Categories and induction in young children

One of the primary functions of natural kind terms (e.g., tiger, gold) is to support inductive inferences. People expect members of such categories to share important, unforeseen properties, such as internal organs and genetic structure. Moreover, inductions can be made without perceptual support: even when an object does not look much like other members of its category, and even when a property is unobservable. The present work addresses how expectations about natural kinds originate. Young children, with their usual reliance on perceptual appearances and only rudimentary scientific knowledge, might not induce new information within natural kind categories. To test this possibility, category membership was pitted against perceptual similarity in an induction task. For example, children had to decide whether a shark is more likely to breathe as a tropical fish does because both are fish, or as a dolphin does because they look alike. By at least age 4, children can use categories to support inductive inferences even when category membership conflicts with appearances. Moreover, these young children have partially separated out properties that support induction within a category (e.g., means of breathing) from those that are in fact determined by perceptual appearances (such as weight). Since we examined only natural kind categories, we do not know to what extent children have differentiated natural kinds from other sorts of categories. Children may start out assuming that categories named by language have the structure of natural kinds and with development refine these expectations.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26083/1/0000159.pd

Medical Student Mistreatment: Understanding \u27Public Humiliation\u27

Introduction: Mistreatment in medical school is an enduring problem in medical education. Little is known about the concept of ‘public humiliation,’ one of the most common forms of mistreatment as identified on the AAMC Graduation Questionnaire. The objective of this study was to further investigate ‘public humiliation’ and to understand the underpinnings and realities of ‘public humiliation’ in medical education. Method: Focus groups of medical students on clinical rotation at the University of Washington School of Medicine were conducted over one and a half years. Qualitative analysis of responses identified emergent themes. Results: Study results included responses from 28 third year and one fourth-year medical student obtained over five different focus groups. Participants defined the term ‘public humiliation’ as negatively, purposefully induced embarrassment. Risk factors for the experience of public humiliation in educational settings were found to include the perceived intent and tone of the teacher, as well as situations being ‘public’ to patients and taking place during a medical or surgical procedure. Socratic teaching or ‘pimping’ was not found to be a risk factor as long as learners were properly oriented to the teaching practice. Discussion: This study investigated and defined ‘public humiliation’ in the setting of medical student mistreatment. More subtle forms of mistreatment, like public humiliation, may be amenable to interventions focused on teaching educators about the importance of orientation and clear communication of intent during the teaching process

Contributions of laboratory results to promote the sanitation of the pharmaceutical market in Brazil

Medicine, as an instrument for health promotion, can be considered a risk factor when used inappropriately or when its quality is compromised. It is for the manufacturer to produce medicine meeting quality standards and for the State to monitor and regulate the whole supply chain process. The results of this study come from 306 sample medicines analysed by the Antibiotics Section of the Adolfo Lutz Institute, by the Z and the National Programmes of Quality Control of Medicines in the period 2003-2009: 88 % were considered satisfactory while 12 % were unsatisfactory, of which 2 % due to labeling analyses and 10 % to physicochemical analyses, mainly for the trials of visual aspect and dissolution.The laboratory findings proved to be of great importance and relevance that the State implement programmes of quality control and that Central Laboratories of Public Health assure the execution of Good Manufacturing Practices and the consumer defense directives.Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

Word learning in dogs?

In a recent paper, Kaminski, Call and Fischer report pioneering research on word-learning in a dog. In this commentary we suggest ways of distinguishing referential word use from mere association. We question whether the dog is reasoning by exclusion and, if so, compare three explanations -learned heuristics, default assumptions, and pragmatic reasoning -as they apply to children and might apply to dogs. Kaminski et al.'s work clearly raises important questions about the origins and basis of word learning and social cognition. Kaminski, Call and Fischer's [1] fascinating report of word learning in a border collie named Rico has far-reaching implications. Rico's 200-word vocabulary is impressive, but of more interest to us are the claims about the speed with which new words are acquired and about his reasoning by exclusion to infer the referent of a novel word. In this commentary, we address two fundamental issues that these findings raise: Bloom [2] points out that Rico's performance does not show that he treats words as referring to objects rather than as holophrastic (undifferentiated, phrase-like) commands associated with object-specific desired actions. Bloom notes that children learn words that refer to objects in different contexts, that they can learn through overhearing, and that they learn words for categories and not just proper names. He suggests these as standards to assess Rico's performance. We would add that the most striking demonstrations of young children's understanding that words are used to refer to objects come from experiments that deliberately pit reference against well-known markers of associative learning, such as temporal contiguity. At 20 months children will map a novel word onto an object they are actively attending to only if they confirm that the speaker is attending to the object as well [3]. Eighteen-month-olds will also reject a mapping between a word and an object when the speaker's emotional reaction (e.g. 'Whoops!') suggests that the coincidence between the two is accidental or mistaken [4]. These infants' treatment of words clearly goes beyond associative learning based on temporal contiguity. By late infancy, humans have an intentional and referential understanding of words, grounded in a lay 'theory-of-mind'. We do not know from Kaminski et al.'s results whether Rico shares such an understanding. There is evidence from adult dogs as well as newborn puppies to suggest that domestic dogs have an innate preparedness to read human communicative signals, such as pointing [5]. If Rico can be shown to monitor a speaker's referential intent, that would be a strong demonstration that he treats words as referential rather than merely associative. Reasoning by exclusion in children and Rico By far the most striking finding is Rico's apparent ability to infer the referent of a novel word in the absence of a direct external cue. In the reasoning-by-exclusion test trials in Kaminski et al.'s study, one novel object was placed among familiar objects and Rico was asked to retrieve an object using a novel label. This design closely parallels those used to demonstrate word-learning by exclusion in young preschoolers These findings are less convincing than they appear at first sight. Although the follow-up comprehension results look impressive, they could be attributable to the reinforcement Rico received after initially retrieving the novel object (J. Fischer, pers. commun.). Would long-term learning result from reasoning via exclusion, with no positive feedback given to Rico? The presence of feedback does not, of course, explain how Rico arrived at the correct mapping in the first place. On this point, however, another potential problem with Kaminski et al.'s exclusion task is that, unlike studies with children, this study did not include a control for baseline novelty preference. If Ric

Constraints children place on word meanings

This paper views lexical acquisition OS a problem of induction: Children must figure out the meaning of a given term, given the large number of possible mean-ings any term could have. If children had to consider, evaluate, and rule out an unlimited number of hypotheses obout each word in order to figure out its mean-ing, learning word meanings would be hopeless. Children must, therefore, be limited in the kinds of hypotheses they consider as possible word meanings. This paper considers three possible constraints on word meanings: (1) The whole object assumption which leads children to interpret navel terms as labels for objects-not parts, substances, or other properties of objects: (2) The taxonomic assumption which leads children to consider labels as referring to objects of like kind, rather than to objects that are thematically related: and (3) The mutual exclusivity assumption which leads children to expect each object to hove only one label. Some of the evidence for these constraints is reviewed. Children acquire the vocabulary of natural languages at remarkable speed. In a carefully documented study of an individual child’s vocabulary acquisi-tion, Dromi (1987) reports a point at which her child began acquiring new vocabulary at the rate of 45 words a week. This fits with calculations re-ported by Carey (1978): by age six children have learned 9,000-14,000 words which works out to roughly nine new words a day from about 18 months on. It is still largely a mystery as to how children acquire language at this astonishing rate. A traditional explanation for how children form categories and acquire category terms was to assume a kind of general, all-purpose, inductive mechanism. Inhelder and Piaget (1964) and Bruner, Olver, and Greenfield (1966) implicitly held some form of this model. This view about how cate-gories are acquired contains many implicit assumptions about the nature of categories, about the way in which they are learned, and about how chil-dren’s abilities to categorize change with development (for a discussion o