Collaborative pedagogy: 3-year-olds bring pedagogical cues into alignment with analogical reasoning to extract generic knowledge

Abstract

Although there is wide evidence on young children’s category learning, questions concerning how cognitive mechanisms and social mediation work collaboratively in this process remain sparse. Here, we study the impact of pedagogy in young children’s categorization of novel artifacts. A before-and-after micro-genetic study compared 58 3-year-old children’s performance in four learning scenarios which varied in the way category information—the artifact function—was provided: (a) in one single pedagogical demonstration, (b) in several guided pedagogical demonstrations aimed at eliciting analogies and inductions, or (c) employing analogies and inductions, but not in a guided pedagogical way. Results showed that children detected the function as the central conceptual property of the novel artifact only if the information was transmitted analogically (but not inductively) in several pedagogical demonstrations contingent with children categorization performance. These findings expand the role of pedagogy in categorization at an early age, showing that pedagogical cues act in concert with certain inferential learning mechanisms helping children extract generic knowledge.