Categorization Ability, but Not Theory of Mind, Contributes to Children’s Developing Understanding of Expertise

Categorization Ability, but Not Theory of Mind, Contributes to Children’s Developing Understanding of Expertise Judith H. Danovitch (j.danovitch@louisville.edu) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville Louisville, KY 40292 USA Nicholaus S. Noles (n.noles@louisville.edu) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville Louisville, KY 40292 USA Abstract Children as young as age 3 understand that different people have different areas of expertise (i.e., the division of cognitive labor) and they choose information sources accordingly (e.g., Lutz & Keil, 2002). However, it is unclear whether this understanding depends primarily on social cognitive skills, such as an appreciation of others’ mental states, or non-social cognitive skills, such as the ability to categorize different types of entities. To address this question, children ages 3 to 5 (n=63) completed tasks measuring social and non-social cognitive skills, and made inferences about what two unfamiliar experts would know. The results demonstrate that developmental differences in children’s understanding of expertise are mediated through concomitant differences in categorization ability, but not theory of mind. Keywords: Theory of mind; categorization; expertise; conceptual development; social cognition. Introduction It is impossible for one person to know everything. Instead, individuals have non-overlapping knowledge bases such that each person acquires some information firsthand but must rely on other people to access additional information. Because young children are very limited in their direct access to information and they must rely primarily on others for answers, it is unsurprising that the ability to evaluate potential information sources emerges early in life (see Harris, 2012). One way that children can evaluate informants is by considering their areas of expertise. By age 3, children demonstrate a basic understanding of expertise and its relevance for choosing informants. They prefer to consult a car mechanic over a doctor to learn about fixing a bicycle (Lutz & Keil, 2002; Shenouda & Danovitch, 2013) and they trust a dog expert to teach them about dogs, but not about artifacts (Koenig & Jaswal, 2011). By age 5, children can identify which of three familiar experts is best suited to answering a question (Aguiar, Stoess, & Taylor, 2012). Children this age not only infer that an expert is likely to know about phenomena closely related to his or her area of expertise, but they also extend the expert’s knowledge to more distantly related phenomena that involve the same underlying causal principles. For example, children indicate that a bicycle expert would also know about how other vehicles, such as trains and cars, work and would even have a superior understanding of other mechanical devices, such as yo-yos and ladders, relative to an individual with expertise in a biological domain. These findings suggest that by age 5 children already have an understanding of how knowledge clusters in other minds, without having necessarily received explicit instruction about the domains of expertise involved. Although children make quite sophisticated judgments about expertise by age 5, this ability emerges gradually over the preschool years. Lutz and Keil (2002) found that 3-year- olds restricted expert knowledge to phenomena involving topics closely related to an expert’s area of interest (what Lutz & Keil call the “near” category, e.g., judging that an eagle expert knows how ducks swim). By age 4, children extended expert knowledge to questions about more distantly related phenomena (the “middle” category, e.g., how dogs breathe) and, by age 5, they did so for questions about even more distantly related phenomena with the same underlying causal principles (e.g., why apples are sweet). How do children make these inferences without prior instruction or familiarity with scientific domains? According to Lutz and Keil, children do not base their judgments on mere semantic associations or associations between the topics in question. Instead, children’s choices reflect their application of cognitive schemas that tap into the common principles underlying phenomena in domains such as biology and physics. Children refine these schemas and apply them more flexibly as they mature, resulting in increasingly sophisticated judgments about expertise throughout middle childhood (Danovitch & Keil, 2004; Keil et al., 2008). Children’s reasoning about expertise becomes more sophisticated and nuanced between ages 3 and 5, yet the sources of developmental differences in their reasoning remain unexplored. What skills contribute to children’s ability to draw inferences about the way knowledge clusters in expert minds? The current study explores several potential contributors to developmental and individual differences in inferring expert knowledge, with a special emphasis on children’s social cognitive understanding and their categorization skill. Children are motivated from infancy to seek out other people and to understand other minds (see Flavell & Miller, 1998), and it seems likely that judging expertise requires at least a basic appreciation that other minds are different from