Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Categories carve up the world in a structured way, allowingpeople to inductively reason about the properties of novel ex-emplars. Children are still in the process of learning categorystructure, and often fail to leverage the inductive power of theserepresentations to their advantage. For example, young chil-dren generally fail to recognize the value of sampling diverseexemplars to support category-wide generalization. This studyinvestigates whether teaching children the structure within anatural category increases diversity-based inductive reasoning.In an informal science learning environment, we presented 259children aged 5 to 8 years with exemplars of the three maintypes of birds: raptors, songbirds, and waterbirds. After a shortdialogue pointing out the various within-type similarities andbetween-type differences, children’s diversity-based inductivereasoning did not significantly improve, despite them evidenc-ing a better understanding of the category’s structure. Instead,children tended to avoid sampling waterbirds, the least typicalcluster of birds. These patterns suggest that children’s neglectof sample diversity is unlikely to be solely due to their relativeignorance of category structure.