Abstract
This paper describes empirical work and connectionist investigation of the featural basis of children’s knowledge about living things. The empirical data shows differences in the rate at which children acquire subcategories of living things, differences in the timing of changes in knowledge organisation, and changes in the distribution of feature types children use to represent their knowledge. The connectionist model was developed to investigate the role of feature based representations in determining the organisation of knowledge during childhood, and to investigate the possible mechanisms involved in organisational change. The model was trained to associate living thing concepts with their associated features, using a data set derived from studies of children’s featural representations. Analysis showed that a pattern of knowledge organisation strikingly similar to that derived from studies of children’s category fluency and sorting behaviour developed in the model. The results inform on how the featural knowledge base may affect the structure of children’s knowledge and performance on tasks drawing upon this knowledge.
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Hartley, S.J. (2001). Developing Knowledge about Living Things: A Connectionist Investigation. In: French, R.M., Sougné, J.P. (eds) Connectionist Models of Learning, Development and Evolution. Perspectives in Neural Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0281-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0281-6_10
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