Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2025;26(2):221-249.
doi: 10.1080/15248372.2024.2409680. Epub 2024 Nov 4.

How cultural input shapes the development of idealized biological prototypes

Emily Foster-Hanson  1 , Katherine M Ziska  2 , Marjorie Rhodes  3
Affiliations

How cultural input shapes the development of idealized biological prototypes

Emily Foster-Hanson et al. J Cogn Dev. 2025.

Abstract

Young children in the U.S. tend to hold narrow, idealized prototypes for animal and social categories, focusing on ideas about how categories should be and ignoring category variability. The current studies (N = 281) tested how children's reliance on idealized prototypes might be shaped by adults' communication of common essentialist and teleological biases. In Study 1, 7- to 8-year-old U.S. children viewed more average members of novel animal categories as prototypical when they heard a teacher correct a generic statement about a characteristic feature and highlight how varied features serve varied functions. In Study 2, explanations about varied functions alone explained this effect for novel animals, with mixed effects for familiar animals; there was no additive effect of correcting generic language. Children in Study 2 also expected functionally ideal features to be more frequent among category members, suggesting that idealized prototypes reflect mistaken assumptions that category members homogeneously share ideal features. Children in Study 2 did not explicitly disapprove of nonconformity, suggesting that idealized prototypes do not reflect an inability to dissociate how things are from how they should be. Together, these results support the proposal that U.S. children's idealized prototypes are shaped by common conceptual biases perpetuated by cultural input.

Keywords: biological reasoning; characteristic features; conceptual development; ideals; teleology, explanation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Interest Statement The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

References

    1. Ahn W-K (1998). Why are different features central for natural kinds and artifacts?: The role of causal status in determining feature centrality. Cognition, 69(2), 135–178. 10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00063-8 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Amemiya J, Heyman GD, & Walker CM (2023). Emphasizing others’ persistence can promote unwarranted social inferences in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 10.1037/xge0001428 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Anglin JM (1986). Semantic and conceptual knowledge underlying the child’s words. In: Kuczaj SA, & Barrett MD (Eds) The development of word meaning. Springer Series in Cognitive Development. New York, NY: Springer. 10.1007/978-1-4612-4844-6_4 - DOI
    1. Atran S (1994). Core domains versus scientific theories: Evidence from systematics and Itza-Maya folkbiology. In Hirschfeld LA & Gelman SA (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 316–340). Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9780511752902.013 - DOI
    1. Bates D, Mächler M, Bolker B, & Walker S (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.