First Principles Organize Attention to and Learning About Relevant Data: Number and the Animate-Inanimate Distinction as Examples

Early cognitive development benefits from nonlinguistic representations of skeletal sets of domain-specific principles and complementary domain-relevant data abstraction processes. The principles outline the domain, identify relevant inputs, and structure coherently what is learned. Knowledge acquisition within the domain is a joint function of such domain-specific principles and domain-general learning mechanisms. Two examples of early learning illustrate this. Skeletal preverbal counting principles help children sort different linguistic strings into those that function as the conventional count-word as opposed to labels for objects in the child's linguistic community. Skeletal causal principles, working with complementary perceptual processes that abstract information about biological and nonbiological conditions and patterns of movement, lead to the rapid acquisition of knowledge about the animate-inanimate distinction. By 3 years of age children con soy whether photographs of unfamiliar nonmammalian animals, mammals, statues, and wheeled objects portray objects capable or incapable of self-generated motion. They also generate answers to questions about the insides of animate items more readily than ones about the insides of inanimate items. Although these children already ore articulate about matters relevant to a theory of action, their limited knowledge of growth illustrates that early skeletal principles do not rule out the need to acquire new principles, in this case ones that underlie a biological account of animacy (Carey, 1985).     

A Dollar Is a Dollar Is a Dollar,or Is It? Insights From Children's Reasoning About “Dirty Money”

Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (e.g., dirty money). Here we investigate the development of the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. We study children ages 5–6 and 8–9, who are sensitive to both object history and morality, and thus possess the component pieces needed to think that a dollar may not be like any other. Across three principal studies (and three additional studies in Appendix S1 ; N = 327; 219 five- and six-year-olds; 108 eight- and nine-year-olds), we find that children are less likely to want money with negative moral history, a pattern that was stronger and more consistent among 8- and 9-year-olds than 5- and 6-year-olds. These findings highlight pressing directions for future research that could help shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the belief that money carries traces of its moral history.