Harris, Paul L. (2001) Thinking about the unknown. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5 (11). pp. 494-498. ISSN 1364-6613

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Abstract

A long tradition of research suggests that children and adults with no formal education are prone to reason only on the basis of their first-hand experience, and do not encode and reason from novel generalizations supplied by other people. However, recent research reveals that when given simple prompts, even pre-school children can reason from adults’ unfamiliar claims. A radical implication of these findings is that young children arrive at school with a pre-existing capacity for thinking and reasoning about the unknown. The assumption that early learning should be rooted in children's own empirical experience could be mistaken.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	A long tradition of research suggests that children and adults with no formal education are prone to reason only on the basis of their first-hand experience, and do not encode and reason from novel generalizations supplied by other people. However, recent research reveals that when given simple prompts, even pre-school children can reason from adults’ unfamiliar claims. A radical implication of these findings is that young children arrive at school with a pre-existing capacity for thinking and reasoning about the unknown. The assumption that early learning should be rooted in children's own empirical experience could be mistaken.
Keywords:	Thinking, Reasoning, Memory, Categorisation, Categorization
Subjects:	C Biological Sciences > C800 Psychology C Biological Sciences > C850 Cognitive Psychology C Biological Sciences > C820 Developmental Psychology
Divisions:	College of Social Sciences > Faculty of Health & Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Jill Partridge
Date Deposited:	26 Jun 2007
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2013 08:23
URI:	http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/757

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