Grandchamp Des Raux, Helene and Ghilardi, T. and Soderberg, Christina and Ossmy, Ori (2024) The role of action concepts in physical reasoning: insights from late childhood. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 379 (1911), ISSN 0962-8436.
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Abstract
A fundamental component of human cognition is the ability to intuitively reason about behaviours of objects and systems in the physical world without resorting to explicit scientific knowledge. This skill was traditionally considered a symbolic process. However, in the last decades, there has been a shift towards ideas of embodiment, suggesting that accessing physical knowledge and predicting physical outcomes is grounded in bodily interactions with the environment. Infants and children, who learn mainly through their embodied experiences, serve as a model to probe the link between reasoning and physical concepts. Here, we tested school-aged children (5- to 15-year-olds) in online reasoning games that involve different physical action concepts such as supporting, launching and clearing. We assessed changes in children’s performance and strategies over development and their relationships with the different action concepts. Children reasoned more accurately in problems that involved supporting actions compared to launching or clearing actions. Moreover, when children failed, they were more strategic in subsequent attempts when problems involved support rather than launching or clearing. Children improved with age, but improvements differed across action concepts. Our findings suggest that accessing physical knowledge and predicting physical events are affected by action concepts, and those effects change over development.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Ori Ossmy |
| Date Deposited: | 17 Jun 2025 12:19 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Sep 2025 22:09 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/55738 |
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