Developmental changes in strategies for gathering evidence about biological kinds

How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources—for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non-diverse samples (e.g., two robins) and diverse samples as equivalently informative. The current study (N = 249) found that this discontinuity stems from developmental changes in standards for evaluating evidence—younger children chose to learn from exemplars that best approximate idealized views of what category members are supposed to be like (e.g., the fastest cheetahs); with a gradual shift across age towards samples that cover more within-category variation (cheetahs of varying speeds). Implications for the relation between conceptual representations and inductive reasoning strategies will be discussed. In this dataset: -Sample videos for each condition -Illustration materials