Diferencias en la categorización de seres vivos y objetos Estudio en niños de edad escolar

Abstract

Although many studies show that children are able to perform perceptive, thematic and taxonomical characterization, few studies investigate whether adults’ patterns-living things mostly associated with taxonomic and perceptive attributes, and nonliving things, with thematic information-resemble those of children. Thus, this paper undertook to study the types of-mainly taxonomic and thematic-attributes used by 6-to-11-year-old children attending 1st, 3rd and 5th year of basic primary education in Mar del Plata city. This was done through a task that consisted of asking for conceptual attributes of living and nonliving things (ANIMALS, FRUITS, OBJECTS, FURNITURE). We found that thematic relations prevailed in OBJECTS and FURNITURE but not in FRUITS and ANIMALS, which matches with the idea that contextual and functional characteristics are more important for artifacts than living things. Likewise, taxonomic relations prevailed in ANIMALS and FRUITS, and its presence was much lower in OBJECTS and FURNITURE. In conclusion, we found a reverse pattern vis-à-vis that of thematic relations, in accordance with the idea that taxonomic relations are more relevant for living things given their relation to visual processing.