Children's Developing Ideas About Knowledge and Its Acquisition

Children use disagreement to infer what happened

In a rapidly changing and diverse world, the ability to reason about conflicting perspectives is critical for effective communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. The current pre-registered experiments with children ages 7 to 11 years investigated the developmental foundations of this ability through a novel social reasoning paradigm and a computational approach. In the inference task, children were asked to figure out what happened based on whether two speakers agreed or disagreed in their interpretation. In the prediction task, children were provided information about what happened and asked to predict whether two speakers will agree or disagree. Together, these experiments assessed children's understanding that disagreement often results from ambiguity about what happened, and that ambiguity about what happened is often predictive of disagreement. Experiment 1 (N = 52) showed that children are more likely to infer that an ambiguous utterance occurred after learning that people disagreed (versus agreed) about what happened and found that these inferences become stronger with age. Experiment 2 (N = 110) similarly found age-related change in children's inferences and also showed that children could reason in the forward direction, predicting that an ambiguous utterance would lead to disagreement. A computational model indicated that although children's ability to predict when disagreements might arise may be critical for making the reverse inferences, it did not fully account for age-related change.

The breadth and specificity of 18-month-old's infant-initiated interactions in naturalistic home settings

Infants actively initiate social interactions aiming to elicit different types of responses from other people. This study aimed to document a variety of communicative interactions initiated by 18-month-old Turkish infants from diverse SES (N = 43) with their caregivers in their natural home settings. The infant-initiated interactions such as use of deictic gestures (e.g., pointing, holdouts), action demonstrations, vocalizations, and non-specific play actions were coded from video recordings and classified into two categories as need-based and non-need-based. Need-based interactions were further classified as a) biological (e.g., feeding); b) socio-emotional (e.g., cuddling), and non-need-based interactions (i.e., communicative intentions) were coded as a) expressive, b) requestive; c) information/help-seeking; d) information-giving. Infant-initiated non-need-based (88%) interactions were more prevalent compared to need-based interactions (12%). Among the non-need-based interactions, 50% aimed at expressing or sharing attention or emotion, 26% aimed at requesting an object or an action, and 12% aimed at seeking information or help. Infant-initiated information-giving events were rare. We further investigated the effects of familial SES and infant sex, finding no effect of either on the number of infant-initiated interactions. These findings suggest that at 18 months, infants actively communicate with their social partners to fulfil their need-based and non-need-based motivations using a wide range of verbal and nonverbal behaviors, regardless of their sex and socio-economic background. This study thoroughly characterizes a wide and detailed range of infant-initiated spontaneous communicative bids in hard-to-access contexts (infants' daily lives at home) and with a traditionally underrepresented non-WEIRD population.

Young children's conceptualization of empirical disagreement

Chinese and American children aged 5-11 years (total N = 144) heard two child informants make conflicting empirical claims about each of 4 scenarios. For example, one informant claimed that a ball would float when dropped in water whereas the other informant claimed that it would sink. Children were asked to judge whether each informant could be right, and to justify their overall judgment. In both samples, there was a change with age. Older children often said that each informant could be right whereas younger children, especially in China, were more likely to say that only one informant could be right. Nevertheless, in the wake of decisive empirical evidence (e.g., the ball was shown to sink when dropped in water), almost all children, irrespective of age, drew appropriate conclusions about which of the two informants had been right. Thus, with increasing age, children differ in their prospective - but not in their retrospective - appraisal of empirical disagreement. Absent decisive evidence, older children are more likely than younger children to suspend judgment by acknowledging that either of two conflicting claims could be right. We argue that children's tendency to suspend judgment is linked to their developing awareness of empirical uncertainty, as expressed both in the justifications they give when judging the disagreement and in their own beliefs about the scenarios. Implications for children's understanding of disagreement are discussed.

"Why do dogs pant?": Characteristics of parental explanations about science predict children's knowledge

Using a new method for examining parental explanations in a laboratory setting, the prompted explanation task, this study examines how characteristics of parental explanations about biology relate to children's knowledge. Parents (N = 148; M_age = 38; 84% female, 16% male; 67% having completed college) of children ages 7–10 (M_age = 8.92; 47% female, 53% male; 58% White, 9.5% Black, 9.5% Asian) provided answers to eight how and why questions about biology. Parents used a number of different approaches to address the questions, including providing more mechanistic responses to how questions and more teleological responses to why questions. The characteristics of parental explanations—most notably, how frequently parents provided correct responses—predicted children's performance on measures of verbal intelligence and biological knowledge. Additional exploratory analyses and implications for children's learning are discussed.

Children's understanding of when a person's confidence and hesitancy is a cue to their credibility

The most readily-observable and influential cue to one's credibility is their confidence. Although one's confidence correlates with knowledge, one should not always trust confident sources or disregard hesitant ones. Three experiments (N = 662; 3- to 12-year-olds) examined the developmental trajectory of children's understanding of 'calibration': whether a person's confidence or hesitancy correlates with their knowledge. Experiments 1 and 2 provide evidence that children use a person's history of calibration to guide their learning. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed a developmental progression in calibration understanding: Children preferred a well-calibrated over a miscalibrated confident person by around 4 years, whereas even 7- to 8-year-olds were insensitive to calibration in hesitant people. The widespread implications for social learning, impression formation, and social cognition are discussed.