Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Explanations often highlight inductively rich relationships thatsupport further generalizations: learning that the knife is sharpbecause it is for cutting, we correspondingly infer that other thingsfor cutting might also be sharp. When do children appreciate thatexplanations are good guides to generalization? We report a study inwhich 108 4- to 7-year-old children evaluated mechanistic,functional, and categorical explanations for the properties of objects,and subsequently generalized those properties to novel objects onthe basis of shared mechanisms, functions, or category membership.Older children, but not younger children, were significantly morelikely to generalize when the explanation they had received matchedthe subsequent basis for generalization (e.g., generalizing on thebasis of a shared mechanism after hearing a mechanisticexplanation). These findings shed light on how explanation andgeneralization are coordinated over development, as well as the roleof explanations in young children’s learning