How do our notions of the natural world unfold, across development and across the world’s communities?
What does it mean to be ‘alive’? What is the relation between humans and other living things? Questions like these require a cross-cultural approach. After all, infants and children living in a remote village in the Chaco rain forest, and those living in an urban Chicago neighborhood, see vastly different objects and events, and learn vastly different languages. Our research in the US includes children from native and non-native American communities. Our research abroad includes children from Indonesia, China, and the Chaco rainforest (Argentina).
Projects
How do I learn through play?
Naming the Living Things
How Do Picture Books Shape Us?
- Taverna, A., Medin, D.L., & Waxman, S.R. (in press). “Inhabitants of the earth”: Reasoning about folkbiological concepts in Wichi children and adults. In (Edited volume) Young Children’s Developing Understanding of the Biological World, Abingdon, England: Routledge.
- Bang, M., Alfonso, J., Faber, L., Marin, A., Marin, M., Medin, D., Waxman, S., & Woodring, J. (in press). Perspective taking in early childhood books: Implications for early science learning. Cultural Studies of Science Education.
- Washinawatok, K., Rasmussen, C., Bang, M., Medin, D., Woodring, J., Waxman, S., Marin, A., Gurneau, J., & Faber, L. (2017). Children’s Play with a Forest Diorama as a Window into Ecological Cognition. Journal of Cognition and Development, 18(5), 617-632. doi: 10.1080/15248372.2017.1392306
- Waxman, S., Herrmann, P., Woodring, J., & Medin, D. (2014). Humans (really) are animals: Picture-book reading influences five-year-old urban children’s construal of the relation between humans and non-human animals. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 5,(172). doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00172.
- Taverna, A. S., Waxman, S. R. Medin, D. L., Moscoloni, N. & Peralta, O. A. (2014). Naming the living things: linguistic, experiential and cultural factors in Wichí and Spanish speaking children. Journal of Culture and Cognition, 14, 213-233.
- Dehghani, M., Bang, M., Medin, D.L., Marin, A., Leddon, E., & Waxman, S. (2013). Epistemologies in the text of children’s books: Native and non-Native authored books. International Journal of Science Education, 35(13), 2133-2151.
- Taverna, A., Waxman, S., Medin, D., & Peralta, O. (2012). Core-folkbiological concepts: New evidence from Wichí children and adults. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 12(3-4) 339–358.
- Unsworth, S. J., Levin, W., Bang, M., Washinawatok, K., Waxman, S. R., & Medin, D. L. (2012). Cultural differences in children’s ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature: Evidence from Menominee and European-American children. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 12(1-2), 17-29.
- Herrmann, P., Medin, D. L., & Waxman, S. R. (2012). When humans become animals: Development of the animal category in early childhood. Cognition, 122(1), 74-79.
- Anggoro, F., Medin, D., & Waxman, S. (2010). Language and Experience Influence Children’s Biological Induction. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10, 171-187.
- Winkler-Rhoades, N., Medin, D. L., Waxman, S. R., & Woodring, J., Ross, N. O. (2010). Naming the animals that come to mind: Effects of culture and experience on category fluency. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10, 205-220.
- Herrmann, P., Waxman, S. R., & Medin, D. L. (2010). Anthropocentrism is not the first step in children’s reasoning about the natural world. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(22), 9979-9984.
- Waxman, S. R., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. (2007). Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective: Early essentialist notions are shaped by cultural beliefs. Developmental Psychology, 43(2), 294-308.