How did you learn your animals?

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In particular, I'm curious about how you learned what different animals were. I've been discussing it with a few people, and want to get a larger sample size.

So far, everyone I've asked learned their animals separately. For example, they learned dog, then cat. If they were then shown a horse, they didn't know what a horse was, but they knew it wasn't a dog or a cat. Each animal's separateness from other animals was self-evident, and they only needed the name of the animal.

How I learned was completely different. I learned the first animal, dog I think, and every animal after was categorized by how it wasn't a dog. At first all animals were dogs, then cats were pointed out, and I thought cats were small and dogs were big. Then I found out about cows, which I called dogs, and was corrected. So then dogs were medium sized four legged furry animals, cows were large ones, cats were small ones. When I saw a horse, I called it a cow, and was corrected again. So the fat large ones were cows and the skinny fast large ones were horses. Small dogs threw me for a while until I found another distinction between dogs and cats.

And so on. My knowledge of animals, and most things, is essentially one gigantic decision tree. I don't consciously work through the tree anymore, except when I occasionally encounter some new animal. If it's something weirdly between all of my accepted categories, my mind zips down the logic tree until it hits a point of failure. The animal doesn't fit anywhere. There's a few moments of serious discomfort, the creature not fitting into any place makes it hard to look at, like it's foggy, except the fog isn't a physical vision problem. Then my mind gets past this error mode and I can see the animal clearly, and start trying to fit it onto my tree someplace.


So I was just wondering where you all fell on this, or did you have an entirely different experience?

I have no recollection at all of learning animals. I don't have much long term memory of experiences at all.

Everyone else is wrong and you are right. According to research, humans learn animals at first as all being dogs, then the process is exactly as you described it, so I won't repeat Thing is, most humans don't remember or aren't conscious of this process, that's why they tell you otherwise.

Indeed, as you mention, at first, a child will call any living thing walking on all fours, "doggy". From there, when shown the difference, the non-dog becomes "cat". And so on. But there's a maturity stage to be reached before the child can differentiate the sub-group from the generic group. You can't rush a child to differentiate between animals before he's reached the right stage.

Your metaphor of a tree in the learning process is very good.

This book talks about that topic: The brain-shaped mind
Summarizing, it seems like the brain starts generalizing:

dogs = animals with four legs

then when you see a difference you create a new category:


dogs = animals with four legs & long muzzles,
cats = animals with four legs & short muzzles

I learned cats first, from iFather doodling cats eberrywhere. Also rabbits. To this day, I am obsessed with cats and rabbits. I like to doodle them eberrywhere.