Behaviorism in child psychology

Psychology

Child Psychology and Inherent Concepts of Animacy

The question of animacy and how early an understanding of the concept develops among human beings is not as certain as was once thought. In the past, based largely on the work of Jean Piaget, psychologists came to accept his conclusion that children developed a conception of animism very gradually over a period of many years. Piaget went so far as to suggest that the individual's animistic sense is not fully developed until sometime around age eleven or twelve (Stone, 1930). At issue is how quickly the child develops a sense of the difference between animate objects and inanimate ones.

It may seem obvious to us as adults that animals and plants are animate, while rocks are not. To a child, however, this is less clear. Rocks can move, after all -- from a child's logic that movement could be construed as a product of willful action instead of just physics. When a river flows downhill, it could be easy for a child to mistake such motion as evidence of the river's animate nature. Only with time does a conception of the principles of animacy develop. The real question is how long of a period of time does it take for this sense to emerge. Piaget argued that it took more than a decade; however, evidence has mounted to demonstrate that Piaget's conclusions were inaccurate at best. Ample evidence exists to indicate that a conception of animism emerges in children at a much younger age than that.

Piaget's research into child development concluded that children's conception of animacy didn't reach maturity until at least age eleven or age twelve. His arguments centered on his conclusion that children remain animistic until early adolescence. By this, Piaget meant that children inappropriately attribute properties of animate beings to inanimate objects. This quality made young children animistic because they wrongly assumed that most objects possessed an animate will that shaped actions (Dewart, 1979; Dolgin and Behrend, 1984). The incapacity to understand the difference between animate objects and inanimate objects is the difference between the philosophical concepts of a subject and an object. A subject is capable of action and can make choices and act on decisions made. A subject is an actor in the world capable of affecting change. An object, on the other hand, can only be acted upon. It is passive in the world, and is little more than a sometimes useful prop that subjects make use of during the course of their actions.

This difference, though it seems obvious to all of us now, is subtler than one realizes. Outlining the characteristics of animate subjects in particular can be challenging, because one must be specific without excluding certain kinds of animate beings. People and animals are obvious, but what about plants? Or bacteria? If Piaget's conclusions about childhood development were correct, then it should have been considered nothing less than fantastic that human children are able to develop a mature conception of animate and inanimate objects within just a decade of life.

Unfortunately for Piaget's ego, a growing body of scholarly studies on the subject have illustrated that animistic tendencies -- the incapacity to be able to clearly differentiate between animate and inanimate objects -- is not as common as Piaget reported nor as long lasting (Dolgin and Behrend, 1984). Numerous studies -- over the last twenty years especially -- have come to light that indicate that animistic persistence is not common at all. Of course, like any researcher, Piaget could only base his conclusions on the research he had done and the evidence at hand. It may just be that his sample size or selection was too small or unvaried to provide accurate conclusions about childhood development for all people. In fact, Dolgin and Behrend (1984) came to a similar conclusion. Their study also examined the matter of persistent animism in children, but they used a much larger sample size than Piaget had employed. What's more, the researchers questioned the children regarding a larger number of properties of a larger number of animate and inanimate objects. Their results found no significant evidence to suggest that animism is a pervasive part of early childhood development or that it occurs consistently in children.

One of the primary questions that researchers must ask when they seek to better understand the nature of the development of the concepts of animate and inanimate objects is whether or not children have a knowledge of the innate differences between biology, physics, and psychology (Inagaki and Hatano, 2006). This is the key question that must be asked, even if researchers pursue from a variety of angles. Obviously, the nature of biology plays a large role in our understanding of the differences between animate and inanimate objects. Biological life is almost exclusively attributed to the former category, while non-life is placed in the latter. Understanding how objects can demonstrate some qualities of subjects is the domain of physics. A person and a rock can both roll down a hill, but one does it through action of will and the other does it by dint of the physical nature of gravity. Finally, we cannot ignore the input that psychology plays in making determinations between animate and inanimate objects. The capacity for thought and internal decision-making is invariably a property of animate objects, though inanimate objects might mistakenly be assumed to possess similar qualities.

The emerging consensus among researchers into developmental studies is that children as young as five possess a knowledge system known as naive biology that is capable of making coherent predictions and explanations about biological phenomena (Inagaki and Hatano, 2006). This knowledge system allows children at this young of an age to accurately distinguish between living and nonliving things. Since understanding the difference between living and nonliving things is arguably one of the most important factors in deciding whether or not an object is animate or inanimate, it follows that the presence of naive biology in five-year-olds is an especially instructive find. This capacity would have had to develop in children by the time that they reached Piaget's mark of eleven or twelve years if we could expect them to have a mature understanding of the difference between animate and inanimate objects. That the ability emerges much earlier than this -- by half -- is a stunning conclusion that undermines Piaget's map of development and pushes back the development of an understanding of the difference between animate and inanimate objects.

In fact, more recent and reputable research has consistently pushed back the age of development of this conception to around four or five years old. Rather than waiting for adolescence, children are apparently developing basic conceptions of animate and inanimate objects before entering kindergarten. Inagaki and Hatano (1996) found that by the age of five children can distinguish animals and plants from inanimate things based on the ability of the former to grow over time. Since only animate, living beings can grow it becomes readily apparent that even at this young age children have an integrated conception of the differences between living and nonliving things. Whether this is the same as the naive biology mentioned earlier was beyond the scope of this particular study. Nonetheless, it follows the same lines and demonstrates that at a very young age children are classifying their environment based on characteristics of life vs. non-life. Granted, this study doesn't necessarily prove that children have an autonomous sense of biology, even an innate biological knowledge coded into their genes. Proving that is much more difficult.

However, even if we accept that the ability to classify the environment based on animate and inanimate categories is a developed ability, this study still pushes back that development significantly. Early studies such as Piaget's conformed to the conclusion that this sense only develops in early adolescence; this research challenges that conventional view of development and illustrates that the development of this sense at least much occur much more rapidly than previously believed to occur in children.

But as fantastic as it might seem that children develop a conception of animacy by age five, other studies into linguistics reveal that the foundation for this conception appears much earlier during the language learning process. Dewart (1979) found that linguistic concepts of animacy develop as early as age three or four. When presented when basic sentence structures -- noun-verb-noun -- children questioned were significantly more likely to expect that the first noun in the sentence would be animate while the second would be inanimate. This conclusion runs parallel to our standard expectations of grammatical sentence construction that is noun-verb-direct object. The noun acts on the direct object, which is acted upon. As we already saw, animate beings are possessed of agency and subjectivity in contrast to inanimate objectivity and passivity. Children in this study were able to make that distinction at a remarkably young age based on the construction of the sentence.

This finding suggests two points: first, Piaget's argument that animism is pervasive in children until the age of eleven or twelve is obviously erroneous. It is clear from the studies thus far examined (plus a few more) that the ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects develops much earlier than Piaget imagined. Second, while it is unclear from this study if the rules of grammar inform the child's sense of animacy or vice versa, we find that children significantly tend to attribute animate characteristics to a sentence's first noun and inanimate qualities to the second. In either case, clearly children are able to make early deductions about the characteristics of animate objects vs. inanimate ones. Perhaps they were able to draw conclusions about the most logical configuration about the sentence based on their preexisting knowledge of animacy, or perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps the rules of grammar that have already been taught informed children's sense of animacy. Whichever the reality, the development of an understanding of the differences between animate and inanimate objects clearly occurs at a very young age.

Other studies on the subject only confirm this position with other pieces of the overall puzzle of development. Another linguistic examination found that a child's ability to determine whether or not a sentence was anomalous is based on preexisting notions about animacy (Schwartz, 1980). In other words, a child's ability to tell if a sentence was constructed anomalously based on animacy characteristics was based on presupposition the child had regarding animacy. A young child, thus, who had not yet figured out that rocks don't move on their own might judge this sentence -- "The rock thought long and hard before deciding to roll down the hill" -- to be perfectly all right. An adult, on the other hand, would quickly point out the anomalous nature of this sentence because of the adult's more mature sense of animate vs. inanimate knowledge.

Schwartz (1980) found that a child's ability to judge a sentence anomalous was based on the preexisting knowledge of animacy. Unfortunately, since this study was designed to examine grammar development, its applicability to the question at hand is only tangential. It does however suggest that the development of knowledge of animate and inanimate differences precedes grammatical development, a finding that shapes our understanding of the previous study's findings (Dewart, 1979). That study found that children as young as five were able to determine animacy based on sentence structure, but was unclear about whether or not a knowledge of animacy preceded a knowledge of grammar. Schwartz (1980) seems to suggest that knowledge of animacy must come first. That would mean that development of knowledge of the difference between animate and inanimate objects must occur as young as age three or four, much younger than previously thought.

Of course, there are other means to test the development of this ability in children that cover topics other than grammar and linguistics. Greif and his fellow researchers (2006) recently tested thirty-two preschool age children, encouraging them to ask questions about the characteristics of images of animals and artifacts that were shown to them. The research methodology was simple: show children images of either animals or objects and then draw conclusions about their development based on the kind of questions the children employed to find out more about the images. Importantly, the questions that the children framed were never categorically inappropriate: no child asked what kind of babies a volcano had, or what was the favorite lunch of a street sign.

Instead, the children were more likely to ask questions that probed the function of the artifacts and the biological natures of the animals. The inevitably conclusion that the researchers came to was that the children at that age were already classifying artifacts based on their intended function, while they categorized animals by biological characteristics (Greif et al., 2006). This means, of course, that by the time that the children were investigated by the researchers, they already had a basic knowledge of the difference between animate and inanimate objects. If they did not already have in their minds a basic picture of what constituted the differences between these two, then they would have found it impossible -- or at least difficult -- to ask appropriately framed questions about the images the researchers showed them. The fact that the children had no difficulty in doing so means that they had already developed knowledge of the difference between animate and inanimate objects.