中国科学院心理研究所机构知识库

学前儿童朴素生物学理论发展的研究近20年来一直是儿童认知发展研究的热点。Carey等主张学前儿童的生物概念系统是从心理概念系统中分离出来的由一个系统到另一个系统的根本性概念转变,儿童还没有一个包含动植物的整合的生物系统。但另一些研究主张学前儿童能够对生物现象进行本体区分并形成内在一致的生物学因果解释,拥有朴素生物学理论,该理论是在一个概念系统(生物学概念系统)中逐渐的连续性变化过程。目前整合的观点认为儿童朴素生物学理论在童年早期就独立于心理学理论,但在分离一开始的一段时间里还要受心理学的影响。

The studies of preschoolers’ development of theory of naïve biology have been the hot issues of children cognitive development in last 20 years. Carey claimed that young children’s conceptions of living things undergo radical conceptual change that intuitive biology emerges from an intuitive psychology and do not possess an integrated concept of living things that includes both animals and plants. An alternative view, a growing number of cognitive developmentalists argued that young children honor the biological ontological distinction and use coherent biological causal principles in reasoning about biological domain. So they possess the naïve theory of biology, and the child’s conceptual system may involve the gradual elaboration of a single system. Now, the integrated view claimed that naïve biology is separated from naïve psychology at early ages but is sometimes influenced by psychological understandings that were established even earlier.