The organization of knowledge according to relations between concepts is critically involved in many cognitive processes, including memory and reasoning. However, the role of learning in shaping knowledge organization has received little direct investigation. Therefore, the present study investigated whether informal learning experiences can drive rapid, substantial changes in knowledge organization in children by measuring the effects of a week-long Zoo summer camp versus a control camp on the degree to which 4- to 9-year-old children’s knowledge about animals was organized according to taxonomic relations. Although taxonomic organization did not differ at pre-test, only Zoo camp children showed increases in taxonomic organization at post-test. These findings provide novel evidence that informal, real-life learning experiences can drive rapid knowledge organization change.

Sensitivity to statistical co-occurrence regularities is present from infancy. This sensitivity may contribute to learning in many domains, including category learning. However, prior research has not examined whether everyday input conveys category-relevant statistical regularities. This study assessed whether statistical regularities relevant to real-world categories are present in a commonly experienced source input – children’s picture books. We focused on animal categories because this is a domain in which children receive much exposure from an early age, while simultaneously holding persistent misconceptions about category membership beyond preschool years. Analysis of 80 books revealed that they: 1) Were likely to contain regularities from which individual species categories (e.g., “chicken”) might be learned, but 2) Were unlikely to contain regularities from which broader taxonomic categories (e.g., “bird”) might be learned. These findings point to a paucity of taxonomically-relevant statistical regularities that may contribute to persistent taxonomic misconceptions.