ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00615.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

There is now considerable evidence that infants are surprised when shown impossible events that violate their beliefs about objects, as indexed by reliably greater looking times at these events than at possible events that are consistent with their beliefs. Do infants also attempt, as older children and adults do, to generate explanations for these impossible events? Data from our laboratory provide intriguing hints that infants, like older children and adults, strive to reconcile what they observe with what they believe. This evidence comes from experiments in which infants were presented with an impossible and a possible event and were foundnotto show the typical preference for the impossible event. Five examples are presented, involving infants aged 3 to 10 months, and ranging over several facets of infants' physical reasoning. It is argued in each case that infants' failure to look preferentially at the impossible event stems from their having arrived at some explanation for the event. In some instances, infants' explanations appear to be entirely self‐produced, as when infants spontaneously posit hidden objects to make sense of otherwise impossible events. In other examples, infants' explanations appear to depend on additional clues provided, either deliberately or inadvertently, by the experimental situation. Despite these superficial differences, however, the examples are all related in suggesting that infants, like older children and adults, actively seek explanations for inconsistencies in their worl

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00616.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

In three experiments, children's ability to identify examples of magic and their credulity towards magic were studied. In Expts 1 and 2 children were asked to distinguish between two equivalent outcomes: one outcome was brought about in an ordinary causal fashion whereas the other violated a familiar physical principle. Taken together, the two experiments show that children aged 3 to 5 years systematically judge the latter type of outcome as magical. Nonetheless, Expt 3 showed that some young children have a credulous stance towards magical outcomes. Having checked that each of two boxes was empty, children aged 3, 5 and 7 years were asked to pretend that one of the two boxes contained a potentially attractive entity (either a fairy or an ice cream). Most children could be allocated to one of two groups: sceptical children who mostly ignored the boxes when left alone, and insisted that it was empty; and credulous children who typically opened a box and acknowledged that they had wondered if the pretend entity was inside it. Overall, the three experiments show that most young children know what counts as magic but vary in their credulity.

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00617.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

In two studies we investigate children's reasoning about the relation between imagination and physical reality. Specifically, we probe young children's understanding that physical objects are not created by the process of imagining. Children aged 3 to 5 years were instructed to imagine objects inside boxes. Children first made verbal judgements about the existence of the imagined objects, and then participated in a behavioural measure. The behavioural measure involved a request from another person for an object of the same type as the one the child had imagined, and children responded by handing this person any of the boxes they believed to contain the requested object. Children's verbal responses indicated some degree of belief in the reality of imagined contents. However, in response to a request for the object, most children did not give the person the box in which they had imagined the object. The presence or absence of a real counterpart to the imagined object seemed to affect this tendency. Results are interpreted in terms of how children's perception of a situation can affect their judgements about imagination.

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00618.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Three studies are presented which examine the degree to which children engage in magical thinking. We suggest that this is not a monolithic question that can be answered by a simple ‘yes' or ‘no’, but involves a number of different facets, including parental input, children's spontaneous beliefs and children's responses to magical events. Conceptions about children's beliefs in magical and fantasy figures were assessed by means of a parent survey. Parents reported that children believe in the reality of a number of fantasy figures and that parents encourage these beliefs to some degree. In Study 2,4‐ and 5‐year‐old children made a clear distinction between possible and impossible transformations of animals and did not invoke magical means to produce any outcome. In Study 3 children were asked if a magician could cause certain animal transformations. Here, the 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds made no distinction between possible and impossible events, reporting that for a magician none of these events was impossible. Few children said that magicians used trickery, instead suggesting that ‘real’ magic was involved. Taken together these studies suggest that children hold a belief in magic, but not an overwhelming

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00619.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Two studies were conducted in an effort to better understand the role of magic in the mental lives of young persons. In both studies, subjects watched what appeared to be a direct violation of some law of physics to which they subscribe. By documenting subjects' reactions to these events we set out to determine whether young persons would undertake to discredit such trumped‐up evidence as ‘magical’. In Study 1, 30 preschoolers, aged 3–5 years, witnessed what appeared to be one solid object passing unhindered through a space already occupied by another solid object. While more than half of the subjects initially labelled the event ‘magical’, over the course of three trials almost all came to judge what they had seen to be ‘a trick’. In Study 2, older children, aged 9–13 years, were exposed to a series of demonstrations in which their understanding of the laws of conservation was challenged. This ‘false feedback’ was administered either by a magician, a psychologist or a ‘priest’. When tested seven to 10 days later, it was primarily the subjects in the magician condition who had begun to recuperate their earlier commitment to the laws of conservation. The results of these two studies suggest that young persons can make effective use of the concept of magic, but perhaps only ‘parlour magic’, as a way of mentally quarantining evidence that appears to contradict their emergin

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00620.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

The problem in this study was to determine the process of acquisition of some fundamental notions (structures) of space and time in preschool children. A fundamental structure that underlies the idea of space is the opposition between the permeability and the impermeability of a physical body for another physical body. A fundamental structure on which the concept of time is based is the opposition between reversibility and irreversibility of complex processes. In two experiments, children aged 4, 5 and 6 years were placed in situations in which they were free to reveal their beliefs in the permeability of a solid body (a glass wall of a box) and in the reversibility of complex processes (turning back into a little boy or girl again). The results showed that at the beginning of the experiment almost all the children denied that permeability or reversibility could occur in real life. However, under the influence of a fairy tale and an adult's instruction, the majority of 4‐ and 5‐year ‐olds revealed their credulity towards such unusual properties of space and time both at the level of practical actions and at the level of verbal judge

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00621.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Book reviewed in this article:Children's Drawings.ByMaureen CoxApe, Primitive Man, and Child: Essays in the History of Behavior.ByA. R. Luria&L. S. Vygotsky

ISSN:0261-510X    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00622.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1994

数据来源: WILEY