Is there anyone who doesn't understand what a fridge is?
I have had a joke argument running with a friend for nearly a decade now. I initially proposed, merely to annoy him, that there must be at least one person (in Ireland, seeing as we are Irish) who does not understand what a fridge is. The point is that the assertion is stupid, but that there is no way to disprove it. But over the years we have refined it because it (at least to me) infers an interesting question about development and cognition. We stand today at:
"How many people are there, alive, in Ireland who have the capacity to understand what a fridge is and what its function is, yet do not?".
There are many proposed explanations for why such a person may exist. They simply have not been exposed to a fridge (unlikely), they may not have had the opportunity yet, and others. Recently I listened to a podcast episode about a man who fled from Somalia to the United States and upon arrival in the mid 2010s was fascinated and surprised by the concept of a dishwasher. Such people are likely rare, but the second concept interests me.
It concerns the segment of the population that is developing (infants) who experience the world and learn. They are surrounded by objects that they have no concept of, until they do. They might not understand how something works, but what it does. I propose that there is probably a reasonable number of children at any given time who exist in the latent period between developing the ability to understand such an object and actually understanding it. So I guess we have:
"At any given time, even for concepts that are nearly universal, there is a nonzero population who could understand them immediately if exposed, but who simply haven't been exposed yet."
Do we have any idea how long this "latent period" tends to be for common cultural concepts? Is there research on how knowledge of ubiquitous objects spreads through developing children or through a population more generally? Or is this the wrong way to think about concept acquisition?
Forgive me if I have chosen the wrong subreddit (I read the rules and this seems to obey them).