Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Dynamic Nature Of Knowledge: Insights From A Dynamic Field Model Of Children’S Novel Noun Generalization, Larissa K. Samuelson, Anne R. Schutte, Jessica S. Horst

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This paper examines the tie between knowledge and behavior in a noun generalization context. An experiment directly comparing noun generalizations of children at the same point in development in forced-choice and yes/no tasks reveals task-specific differences in the way children’s knowledge of nominal categories is brought to bear in a moment. To understand the cognitive system that produced these differences, the real-time decision processes in these tasks were instantiated in a dynamic field model. The model captures both qualitative and quantitative differences in performance across tasks and reveals constraints on the nature of children’s accumulated knowledge. Additional simulations of developmental …