The Effects of Task Requirements on Children's Life Judgments

Abstract

RICHARDS, D. DEAN, and SIEGLER, ROBERT S. The Effects of Task Requirements on Children's Life Judgments. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1687-1696. Although children's understanding of the concept of life has been studied extensively in the past 50 years, findings have been contradictory. Some results have supported Piaget's contention that children identify life with function, motion, or autonomous motion; other results have not. The 4 experiments of our study were designed to establish the conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life by varying task requirements within a common procedural framework. When children were asked either to name living things or to judge the life status of particular entities, they almost never indicated that inanimate objects were alive. When asked to justify their judgments, however, young children frequently cited the object's capacity for movement. In addition, emphasizing the motion states of objects caused 4and 5-year-olds, but not older children, to judge whether objects were alive on the basis of whether the objects were moving. Overall, the results suggested that even 4and 5-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all inanimate objects are not. However, they also indicated that young children relate motion to life in a greater number of contexts than do older children. Variations in the type of data emphasized, the choice of stimuli, and the stage classification criteria appear to account for the diversity of previous conclusions.