Daily animal exposure and children’s biological concepts

• We investigated how children interact with pets and how these interactions shape their developing biological knowledge.
• Children’s interactions with their pets are primarily social.
• Preschool-aged children with pets have more adult-like explicit and conceptual knowledge about animals.
• Preschool-aged children with pets are less anthropocentric.

A large body of research has focused on the developmental trajectory of children’s acquisition of a theoretically coherent naive biology. However, considerably less work has focused on how specific daily experiences shape the development of children’s knowledge about living things. In the current research, we investigated one common experience that might contribute to biological knowledge development during early childhood—pet ownership. In Study 1, we investigated how children interact with pets by observing 24 preschool-aged children with their pet cats or dogs and asking parents about their children’s daily involvement with the pets. We found that most of young children’s observed and reported interactions with their pets are reciprocal social interactions. In Study 2, we tested whether children who have daily social experiences with animals are more likely to attribute biological properties to animals than children without pets. Both 3- and 5-year-olds with pets were more likely to attribute biological properties to animals than those without pets. Similarly, both older and younger children with pets showed less anthropocentric patterns of extension of novel biological information. The results suggest that having pets may facilitate the development of a more sophisticated, human-inclusive representation of animals.