2008 — 2012 |
Lombrozo, Tania |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
The Role of Explanation in Causal Reasoning and Categorization @ University of California-Berkeley
Children, adults, and scientists alike confront the world with a common question: Why? We wonder why people behave in particular ways, why objects have specific properties, and why events unfold as they do. Previous research suggests that there are different kinds of explanations with unique properties, among them mechanistic explanations that appeal to causal mechanisms, and functional explanations that appeal to functions and goals. For example, a tiger's stripes can be explained mechanistically by appeal to genes and development, or functionally by appeal to camouflage. The proposed project investigates the relationship between these kinds of explanations and basic cognitive processes. In particular, the investigators will ask the question of whether mechanistic and functional explanations lead to different ways of conceptualizing objects, and even to different ways of representing the causal structure of the world. Given the intimate relationship between explanation and understanding, explanations may have far-reaching effects on cognition.
The proposed work will address contemporary issues in cognitive psychology concerning causal reasoning and categorization, and has the potential to resolve current controversies concerning the nature of causal representation and the role of causal beliefs and functions in categorization. The project is also of relevance to issues in philosophy regarding causation and explanation, and will foster interdisciplinary communication. Finally, by uncovering the characteristics and consequences of different kinds of explanations, the proposed work will lay the foundations for research concerning children and adults' understanding of scientific explanations, including why some scientific explanations are especially difficult to grasp and how this difficulty can be overcome.
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2011 — 2018 |
Lombrozo, Tania |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Career: Understanding the Role of Explanation in Cognition @ University of California-Berkeley
The proposed research develops and tests an account of explanation to better understand its role in cognition. The central hypothesis is that explanations have certain properties that serve as a mechanism for the development of knowledge structures that are useful in the sense that they support generalization, prediction, and intervention. The primary question that this research asks is how explanation might contribute to the formation of such knowledge. Explanations are evaluated on the basis of several explanatory virtues - properties that increase the perceived quality of explanations. The proposed research considers two cues: an explanation's simplicity and its breadth or ability to unify diverse phenomena. Both are invoked in science and philosophy of science, and are justified on normative grounds within statistic and computer science.
The study describes three kinds of studies. Lab studies that will help identify features of preferred explanations, a more naturalistic study of explanations that are sought and produced via an online environment, and an experiment to compare conditions in which learners are prompted to generate an explanation or listen to facts. The goal is to understand both the function and content of explanations.
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2017 — 2020 |
Lombrozo, Tania Gopnik, Alison (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
The Development of Structural Thinking About Social Categories @ University of California-Berkeley
One way children make sense of the social world is by forming mental representations of categories of people, such as "girls" and "boys" or "children" and "adults." Forming such categories is a useful way to summarize information and to support novel inferences. For instance, if you learn that a person belongs to the category "child," you can infer that the person is young. This work investigates what children's social categories look like, and how their categories affect the way they explain and reason about aspects of the social world. In particular, the experiments focus on whether and when children are able to appreciate that members of a social category can be associated with a property not only because of shared intrinsic characteristics or preferences, but also as a consequence of the larger social structure in which the category members are situated. For instance, girls could be associated with pink clothing because they have an intrinsic preference for pink, or instead because they are embedded in a social structure that increases the probability that they will select pink, perhaps due to external constraints such as availability and social acceptability. Reasoning about social categories in this way requires "structural thinking." The proposed work will chart the development and consequences of structural thinking from preschool through early childhood.
Understanding the nature and development of social categories is important for a variety of reasons. At a theoretical level, structural thinking challenges dominant approaches to the representation of social categories, and therefore opens up new theoretical possibilities. At a practical level, understanding how children learn and reason about social categories is crucial for developing effective ways to mitigate the effects of harmful stereotypes, which could negatively affect not only a child's interactions with others, but also how the child thinks about him- or herself. More generally, structural thinking plays an important role in our ability to reason effectively about most complex systems: people embedded in social structures, individual species operating within ecosystems, or cities operating within state and federal guidelines, to name just a few. Understanding when and how structural thinking emerges can inform the development of educational efforts in childhood and support better decision-making in adulthood.
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