Believing what you're told: young children's trust in unexpected testimony about the physical world

The influence of valence and relationship on children's verification of gossip

Given that children do not always trust gossip, do they spontaneously check what they are told? We provided 5- (N = 32) and 6-year olds (N = 32) with gossip concerning characters in a cartoon they were watching, and examined whether they verified the gossip by actively re-watching the relevant episodes. Six-year olds were more likely to verify gossip than 5-year olds. When gossip targeted their favourite characters, children were more likely to verify negative when compared with positive gossip. However, when gossip targeted children's disliked characters, they showed no such valence bias. These results indicate that children's verification of gossip increases with age, and they evaluate claims selectively.

A cross-linguistic approach to children's reasoning: Turkish- and English-speaking children's use of metatalk

When collaboratively solving problems, children discuss information reliability, for example, whether claims are based on direct or indirect observation, termed as "metatalk". Unlike English in which evidential marking is optional, languages with obligatory evidential marking such as Turkish, might provide children some advantages in communicating the reliability of their claims. The current preregistered online study investigated Turkish- and English-speaking 3- and 5-year-old children's (N = 144) use of metatalk. The child and the experimenter (E) were asked to decide in which of the two houses a toy was hiding. One house had the toy's footprints. When E left the Zoom meeting, an informant told the child that the toy was in the other house without the footprints in three within-subjects conditions. In the direct-observation condition, the child witnessed the informant move the toy. In the indirect-witness condition, the informant checked both houses and said that the toy was in the other house. In the indirect-hearsay condition, the informant simply said that the toy was in the other house. When E returned, the child had to convince E about how they knew the toy was in the other house using metatalk (e.g., "I saw it move"). Turkish-speaking children used metatalk more often than did English-speaking children, especially in the direct-observation condition. In the two indirect conditions, both groups of 5-year-olds were similar in their use of metatalk, but Turkish speaking 3-year-olds produced metatalk more often than did English-speaking 3-year-olds. Thus, languages with obligatory evidential marking might facilitate children's collaborative reasoning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children as young as 3 years of age can produce metatalk. Turkish-speaking children produce metatalk more often than English-speaking children. The difference between the two linguistic groups is more pronounced at age 3.

The struggle to belong: a qualitative exploration of challenges in social spaces faced by children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy attending neuromuscular disorders clinic

PURPOSE

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a genetically linked muscle disease, is one of the most devastating diseases with currently no cure. Developing essential social skills as a child moves into adolescence is particularly problematic in DMD. The present study is an exploration of the social challenges faced by children with DMD.

METHODS

A qualitative study was conducted among ten children diagnosed with DMD receiving treatment in a neuromuscular disorder clinic of a tertiary referral care center in Southern India. Participants were recruited purposively and were interviewed face-to-face and through telephone. The recorded interviews were transcribed and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis.

RESULTS

Mean age of the children was 13.9 (range: 13-15) at the time of the interviews, and six children had stopped schooling. The overarching theme generated from the interviews was struggle to belong, a yearning for normalcy in social spaces. Major identified themes were challenges with schooling, disabling society, feeling of being alone, and feeling of being a burden to the family.

CONCLUSION

The study highlighted the struggles of children that become a complex social problem for them. Efforts need to be made to be child-centric and encourage inclusion by improving accessibility and social support through sensitization programs.

Children teach sensational information-as long as it is true

When sharing information, teenagers and adults prioritize what is sensational or attention-grabbing, sometimes at the cost of the truth. Nothing is known so far about whether young children prefer to transmit sensational information or what they prioritize when the sensational quality of information conflicts with its truth. In two experiments (N = 136), 4- and 5-year-olds engaged in a forced-choice task in which they selected one of two statements to teach to a peer. In the absence of explicit truth value assignments, children of both ages preferred teaching sensational information over non-sensational (neutral) information (p < .0001). When information was sensational but untrue, truth trumped sensationalism in both age groups (p < .0001). The experiments shed more light on biases that affect the early ontogeny of information exchange. Not only do children prioritize certain kinds of information when teaching, they also actively weigh these preferences against one another and mute their bias for sensationalism when veracity is at stake.

Testimony and observation of statistical evidence interact in adults' and children's category-based induction

Hearing generic or other kind-relevant claims can influence the use of information from direct observations in category learning. In the current study, we ask how both adults and children integrate their observations with testimony when learning about the causal property of a novel category. Participants were randomly assigned to hear one of four types of testimony: generic, quantified "all", specific, or only labels. In Study 1, adults (N = 1249) then observed that some proportion of objects (10%-100%) possessed a causal property. In Study 2, children (N = 123, Mage = 5.06 years, SD = 0.61 years, range 4.01-5.99 years) observed a sample where 30% of the objects had the causal property. Generic and quantified "all" claims led both adults and children to generalize the causal property beyond what was observed. Adults and children diverged, however, in their overall trust in testimony that could be verified by observations: adults were more skeptical of inaccurate quantified claims, whereas children were more accepting. Additional memory probes suggest that children's trust in unverified claims may have been due to misremembering what they saw in favor of what they heard. The current findings demonstrate that both child and adult learners integrate information from both sources, offering insights into the mechanisms by which language frames first-hand experience.

Children's developing ability to adjust their beliefs reasonably in light of disagreement

Two preregistered experiments (N = 218) investigated children's developing ability to respond reasonably to disagreement. U.S. children aged 4-9, and adults (50% female, mostly white) formed an initial belief, and were confronted with the belief of a disagreeing other, whose evidence was weaker, stronger than, or equal to participants' evidence. With age, participants were increasingly likely to maintain their initial belief when their own evidence was stronger, adopt the other's belief when their evidence was weaker, and suspend judgment when both had equally strong evidence. Interestingly, 4- to 6-year-olds only suspended judgment reliably when this was assessed via the search for additional information (Experiment 2). Together, our experiments suggest that the ability to respond reasonably to disagreement develops over the preschool years.

Speaking of Kinds: How Correcting Generic Statements can Shape Children's Concepts

Generic language (e.g., "tigers have stripes") leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their scope to a single individual limited beliefs that the referenced categories could explain what their members would be like while broadening the scope to a superordinate category (Study 2) uniquely limited endorsement of gender norms. Across both studies, correcting generics did not alter beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences, suggesting that additional mechanisms (e.g., causal reasoning about shared features) contribute to the development of full-blown essentialist beliefs. These results help illuminate the mechanisms by which generics lead children to view categories as having rich inductive and causal potential; in particular, they suggest that children interpret generics as signals that speakers in their community view the referenced categories as meaningful kinds that support generalization. The findings also point the way to concrete suggestions for how adults can effectively correct problematic generics (e.g., gender stereotypes) that children may hear in daily life.

Learning with certainty in childhood

Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review developmental evidence that this metacognitive strategy does not require reportable processing. Uncertainty prompts nonverbal human infants and nonhuman animals to engage in strategies like seeking help, searching for additional information, or opting out. Certainty directs children's attention and active learning strategies and provides a common metric for comparing and integrating conflicting beliefs across people. We conclude that certainty is a continuous, domain-general signal of belief quality even early in life.

The development of optimistic expectations in young children

Optimism, a bias to overestimate positive and underestimate negative outcomes, may shape how children learn, confront challenges, and overcome setbacks. Although approximately 80% of adults are optimistic, childhood optimism is understudied. A racially and socioeconomically diverse community sample of 152 three- to six-year-old children participated in two experiments (one story-based, one numeric probability-based) that assessed expectations of event outcomes when the likelihood of the outcome occurring either matched or conflicted with the most desirable outcome. The results systematically demonstrate that children are optimistic, even more optimistic for themselves than others, and increasingly integrate probabilistic information into their predictions with age. Differences in optimism were found in children from different socioeconomic backgrounds and those with different levels of depressive symptoms. These findings provide insight into how children reason about the future and elucidate key factors that impact optimistic predictions in childhood.

The origins of trust: Humans' reliance on communicative cues supersedes firsthand experience during the second year of life

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred-like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal search paradigm in four main studies and three supplementary studies (N = 208). Infants and toddlers first see where a reward is, and then an informant communicates to them that it is in another location. We use this general experimental set-up to assess the role of age, informants' knowledge, cue's familiarity, and communicative context on trust in communicated information. Results reveal that infants and toddlers quickly trust familiar and novel communicative cues from well-informed adults. When searching for the reward, they follow a well-informed adults' communicative cue, even when it contradicts what they just saw. Furthermore, infants are less likely to be guided by familiar and novel cues from poorly informed adults than toddlers. Thus, reliance on communication is calibrated during early childhood, up to the point of overriding evidence about informants' knowledge. Moreover, toddlers trust much more strongly a novel cue when it is used in a communicative manner. Toddlers' trust cannot be explained by mere compliance: it is highly reduced when communicated information is pitted against what participants currently see. Thus, humans' strong tendency to rely on familiar and novel communicative cues emerges in infancy, and intensifies during the second year of life. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

I know better! Emerging metacognition allows adolescents to ignore false advice

Adolescents aspire for independence. Successful independence means knowing when to rely on one's own knowledge and when to listen to others. A critical prerequisite thus is a well-developed metacognitive ability to accurately assess the quality of one's own knowledge. Little is known about whether the strive to become an independent decision maker in adolescence is underpinned by the necessary metacognitive skills. Here, we demonstrate that metacognition matures from childhood to adolescence (N = 107) and that this process coincides with greater independent decision-making. We show that adolescents, in contrast to children, take on others' advice less often, but only when the advice is misleading. Finally, we demonstrate that adolescents' reduced reliance on others' advice is explained by their increased metacognitive skills, suggesting that a developing ability to introspect may support independent decision-making in adolescence.

Of Kids and Unicorns: How Rational Is Children's Trust in Testimonial Knowledge?

When young children confront a vast array of adults' testimonial claims, they should decide which testimony to endorse. If they are unable to immediately verify the content of testimonial assertions, children adopt or reject their informants' statements on the basis of forming trust in the sources of testimony. This kind of trust needs to be based on some underlying reasons. The rational choice theory, which currently dominates the social, cognitive, and psychological sciences, posits that trust should be formed on a rational basis, as a result of probabilistic assessments and utility-maximizing calculations. In this paper, the predictions stemming from the rational choice approach to trust are systematically compared with the empirical evidence from the field of developmental psychology on how children establish their trust in testimonial statements. The results of this comparison demonstrate an obvious inadequacy of the rational choice explanation of the emergence and development of children's testimonial trust, regardless of which form of trust rationality-weighting, threshold, or ordering-is examined. As none of the three forms of rationality of children's trust in testimony squares with the empirical data, this paper introduces a new version of trust rationality, adaptively rational trust. It explores the compatibility of the concept of adaptively rational trust with the recent empirical findings in the area of developmental psychology and addresses some avenues for future research on the rationality of testimonial trust.

Preschool Children Rarely Seek Empirical Data That Could Help Them Complete a Task When Observation and Testimony Conflict

Children (N = 278, 34-71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the observed and testimonial evidence conflicted, children were given access to the music box during their sorting. However, children rarely explored. Indeed, they struggled to disregard the misleading testimony both when sorting the figurines and when asked about a future attempt. In contrast, children who explored the effectiveness of the figurines dismissed the misleading testimony.

The effect of disagreement on children's source memory performance

Source representations play a role both in the formation of individual beliefs as well as in the social transmission of such beliefs. Both of these functions suggest that source information should be particularly useful in the context of interpersonal disagreement. Three experiments with an identical design (one original study and two replications) with 3- to 4-year-old-children (N = 100) assessed whether children's source memory performance would improve in the face of disagreement and whether such an effect interacts with different types of sources (first- vs. second-hand). In a 2 x 2 repeated-measures design, children found out about the contents of a container either by looking inside or being told (IV1). Then they were questioned about the contents of the container by an interlocutor puppet who either agreed or disagreed with their answer (IV2). We measured children's source memory performance in response to a free recall question (DV1) followed by a forced-choice question (DV2). Four-year-olds (but not three-year-olds) performed better in response to the free recall source memory question (but not the forced-choice question) when their interlocutor had disagreed with them compared to when it had agreed with them. Children were also better at recalling 'having been told' than 'having seen'. These results demonstrate that by four years of age, source memory capacities are sensitive to the communicative context of assertions and serve social functions.

Are children's judgments of another's accuracy linked to their metacognitive confidence judgments?

The world can be a confusing place, which leads to a significant challenge: how do we figure out what is true? To accomplish this, children possess two relevant skills: reasoning about the likelihood of their own accuracy (metacognitive confidence) and reasoning about the likelihood of others' accuracy (mindreading). Guided by Signal Detection Theory and Simulation Theory, we examine whether these two self- and other-oriented skills are one in the same, relying on a single cognitive process. Specifically, Signal Detection Theory proposes that confidence in a decision is purely derived from the imprecision of that decision, predicting a tight correlation between decision accuracy and confidence. Simulation Theory further proposes that children attribute their own cognitive experience to others when reasoning socially. Together, these theories predict that children's self and other reasoning should be highly correlated and dependent on decision accuracy. In four studies (N = 374), children aged 4-7 completed a confidence reasoning task and selective social learning task each designed to eliminate confounding language and response biases, enabling us to isolate the unique correlation between self and other reasoning. However, in three of the four studies, we did not find that individual differences on the two tasks correlated, nor that decision accuracy explained performance. These findings suggest self and other reasoning are either independent in childhood, or the result of a single process that operates differently for self and others.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11409-021-09263-x.

Young children update their trust in an informant's claim when experience tells them otherwise

Across two experiments, an adult informant presented 220 preschoolers (34-71 months of age) with either a correct claim or an incorrect claim about how to activate a music box by using one of two toy figures. Children were then prompted to explore the figures and to discover whether the informant's claim was correct or incorrect. Children who discovered the claim to be incorrect no longer endorsed it. Moreover, their predictions regarding a new figure's ability to activate the music box were clearly affected by the reliability of the informant's prior claim. Thus, children reassess an informant's incorrect claim about an object in light of later empirical evidence and transfer their conclusions regarding the validity of that claim to subsequent objects.

How Children Learn From Others: An Analysis of Selective Word Learning

One way children are remarkable learners is that they learn from others. Critically, children are selective when assessing from whom to learn, particularly in the domain of word learning. We conducted an analysis of children's selective word learning, reviewing 63 papers on 6,525 participants. Children's ability to engage in selective word learning appeared to be present in the youngest samples surveyed. Their more metacognitive understanding that epistemic competence indicates reliability or that others are good sources of knowledge has more of a developmental trajectory. We also found that various methodological factors used to assess children influence performance. We conclude with a synthesis of theoretical accounts of how children learn from others.

Infant expectations of instant or delayed gratification

Choices between immediate gratification and long-term (but larger) gains are prevalent in human life, which is why the decision-making processes to delay gratification have been studied extensively throughout different developmental ages. Children's delay-of-gratification behaviors have been examined in the well-known "marshmallow test," in which 3- to 5-year-olds are given a marshmallow and told by an experimenter that they can eat it immediately or wait for an unspecified duration of time (which can be capped at 15 min) until the experimenter returns so that they can receive another marshmallow. Children's wait time has been viewed as a good indicator of their later development. Here we show that a group of 22-month-old infants (N = 32) already held expectations about others' choices in a violation-of-expectation looking-time task modeled after the marshmallow test. The infants expected an agent to defer gratification based on a speaker's promise of the second marshmallow available in the future, but to eat the currently attainable marshmallow when the speaker made no such promise. Our findings indicate an early-emerging understanding of others' choices of delayed or instant gratification and shed new light on the development of delay-of-gratification behaviors.

Cross-linguistic frequency and the learnability of semantics: Artificial language learning studies of evidentiality

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn (Typological Prevalence Hypothesis; TPH). Prior work supports this idea in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. Using Artificial Language Learning experiments with adults, we test predictions made by the TPH about the relative learnability of semantic distinctions in the domain of evidentiality, i.e., the linguistic encoding of information source. As the TPH predicted, when exposed to miniature evidential morphological systems, adult speakers of English whose language does not encode evidentiality grammatically learned the typologically most prevalent system (marking indirect, reportative information) better compared to less-attested systems (Experiments 1-2). Similar patterns were observed when non-linguistic symbols were used to encode evidential distinctions (Experiment 3). Our data support the conjecture that some semantic distinctions are marked preferentially and acquired more easily compared to others in both language and other symbolic systems.

Easy Words: Reference Resolution in a Malevolent Referent World

This article describes early stages in the acquisition of a first vocabulary by infants and young children. It distinguishes two major stages, the first of which operates by a stand-alone word-to-world pairing procedure and the second of which, using the evidence so acquired, builds a domain-specific syntax-sensitive structure-to-world pairing procedure. As we show, the first stage of learning is slow, restricted in character, and to some extent errorful, whereas the second procedure is determinative, rapid, and essentially errorless. Our central claim here is that the early, referentially based learning procedure succeeds at all because it is reined in by attention-focusing properties of word-to-world timing and related indicants of referential intent.

Regularity detection and explanation-based learning jointly support learning about physical events in early infancy

The present research considers statistical learning (SL) and explanation-based learning (EBL) as joint mechanisms to support the development of physical knowledge. Infants watched teaching events in which a cover was lowered over an object and released, with outcomes that violated object principles. The object became fully hidden under a cover that was much shorter, and it remained partly visible under a cover that was much taller. Next, infants watched two test events identical to the teaching events except that one of the events was modified to present a plausible outcome and thus deviated from teaching. Infants at 3.5 months readily detected the regularity in the teaching events and noticed the change in the modified test event, whereas 6.5-month-olds did not. The pattern of response was reversed (1) when 3.5-month-olds were primed to notice the violation of object principles in the teaching events, which interfered with EBL and led infants to miss the change in the modified test event; and (2) when 6.5-month-olds were provided ways to remove the violation from the teaching events, which enabled EBL and led infants to notice the change in the modified test event. Together, the results shed light on young infants' approach to learning about physical events-one that integrates SL for pattern detection and EBL for causal coherence of the rule being learned.

Effects of breed group and development on dogs' willingness to follow a human misleading advice

The aim of this work was to investigate the effect of dog breed groups, i.e., primitive, hunting/herding and Mastiff like (Study 1) and development, i.e., 4-month-old puppies vs adults (Study 2) on a quantity discrimination task. The task consisted of three conditions: C1-dogs were asked to choose between a large and a small amount of food; C2-the same choice was presented and dogs could choose after having witnessed the experimenter favouring the small quantity. C3-similar to C2 but the plates had two equally small food quantities. Study 1 revealed that dogs in the hunting/herding group were significantly more likely than Mastiff-like group to choose the small quantity indicated by the person over the large one, although all dog groups chose the large quantity over the small when they had a free choice. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that hunting/herding breeds have been selected for working in cooperation with humans and thus may be more sensitive to human social communicative cues than other breeds. In Study 2, results showed that 4-month-old puppies performed at chance level in C1, whereas in C2 both adults and puppies conformed to the experimenter's choice. In C3, adults followed the experimenter significantly more than puppies, although puppies still followed the experimenter above chance. Overall, domestic dogs seem to rely heavily on social communicative cues from humans, even when the information contradicts their own perception. This tendency to respond to human social cues is present, although at a lesser extent already at 4 months.

Children’s Judgments of Epistemic and Moral Agents: From Situations to Intentions

Children’s evaluations of moral and epistemic agents crucially depend on their discerning that an agent’s actions were performed intentionally. Here we argue that children’s epistemic and moral judgments reveal practices of forgiveness and blame, trust and mistrust, and objection or disapproval and that such practices are supported by children’s monitoring of the situational constraints on agents. Inherent in such practices is the understanding that agents are responsible for actions performed under certain conditions but not others. We discuss a range of situational constraints on children’s early epistemic and moral evaluations and clarify how these situational constraints serve to support children’s identification of intentional actions. By monitoring the situation, children distinguish intentional from less intentional action and selectively hold epistemic and moral agents accountable. We argue that these findings inform psychological and philosophical theorizing about attributions of moral and epistemic agency and responsibility.

The role of intergroup biases in children's endorsement of information about novel individuals

A great body of evidence suggests that children are remarkably selective in accepting information from different sources. Yet, very few studies have focused on children's learning about the attributes of others. In three experiments, we examined how 6- and 7-year-olds' ingroup and outgroup biases about novel target individuals and their biases to follow ingroup informants interact in social learning contexts. Overall, children exhibited a positivity bias, accepting positive testimony about ingroup and outgroup targets, but this bias was significantly higher for ingroup targets. Furthermore, whereas children accepted the positive testimony about ingroup targets regardless of the informant's group membership, children selectively relied on ingroup informants when endorsing information about outgroup targets. These results suggest that children's existing biases interact with their acquisition of knowledge in complex ways and shape their social evaluations. These findings may have important implications for developing strategies to prevent negative biases against outgroup individuals among children.

Older (but not younger) preschoolers reject incorrect knowledge claims

As epistemic and normative learners, children are dependent on their developing skills for evaluating others' claims. This competence seems particularly important in the current digital age in which children need to discern valid from invalid assertions about the world in both real-life and virtual interactions to ultimately gather and accumulate robust knowledge. We investigated whether younger and older preschoolers (N = 48) understand that a speaker's knowledge claim ('I know where X is') may be correct or incorrect given objectively accessible information (about whether the speaker had perceptual access to a critical event). We found that both younger and older preschoolers accepted correct knowledge claims that matched observable reality, but that only older preschoolers reliably rejected incorrect knowledge claims that did not match reality (the speaker lacked perceptual access). Nevertheless, a considerable proportion of younger preschoolers both rejected incorrect knowledge claims and gave valid explanations, suggesting that the ability to scrutinize epistemic claims develops gradually from around 3 to 4 years of age. These findings may help integrate research on children's norm and theory of mind development. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Preschoolers understand that non-epistemic claims (e.g., 'This is an X!') may be correct or incorrect, and they track a speaker's relevant characteristics in testimonial situations. It is not known what preschoolers understand about the validity of epistemic (knowledge) claims (e.g., 'I know that X'). What does this study add? Younger and older preschoolers accepted correct knowledge claims (children observed that a speaker saw a critical event and was thus knowledgeable). Only older preschoolers reliably rejected incorrect knowledge claims (the speaker did not see the critical event). Nevertheless, a considerable proportion of younger preschoolers showed competence in their evaluation of, and reasoning about, incorrect knowledge claims. Findings suggest that the ability to evaluate epistemic claims develops gradually from around 3 to 4 years of age.

Relations Between Language and Cognition: Evidentiality and Sources of Knowledge

Understanding and acquiring language involve mapping language onto conceptual representations. Nevertheless, several issues remain unresolved with respect to (a) how such mappings are performed, and (b) whether conceptual representations are susceptible to cross-linguistic influences. In this article, we discuss these issues focusing on the domain of evidentiality and sources of knowledge. Empirical evidence in this domain yields growing support for the proposal that linguistic categories of evidentiality are tightly linked to, build on, and reflect conceptual representations of sources of knowledge that are shared across speakers of different languages.

Knowing when to trust a teacher: The contribution of category status and sample composition to young children's judgments of informant trustworthiness

Two experiments examined the extent to which category status influences children's attention to the composition of evidence samples provided by different informants. Children were told about two informants, each of whom presented different samples of evidence, and then were asked to judge which informant they would trust to help them learn something new. The composition of evidence samples was manipulated such that one sample included either a large number (n = 5) or a diverse range of exemplars relative to the other sample, which included either a small number (n = 2) or a homogeneous range of exemplars. Experiment 1 revealed that participants (N = 37; M_age = 4.76 years) preferred to place their trust in the informant who presented the large or diverse sample when each informant was labeled "teacher" but exhibited no preference when each informant was labeled "child." Experiment 2 revealed developmental differences in responses when labels and sample composition were pitted against each other. Younger children (n = 32; M_age = 3.42 years) consistently trusted the "teacher" regardless of the composition of the sample the informant was said to have provided, whereas older children (n = 30; M_age = 5.54 years) consistently trusted the informant who provided the large or diverse sample regardless of whether it was provided by a "teacher" or a "child." These results have important implications for understanding the interplay between children's category knowledge and their evaluation of evidence.

Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony

Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants-their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.

The development and developmental consequences of social essentialism

People often view certain ways of classifying people (e.g., by gender, race, or ethnicity) as reflecting real distinctions found in nature. Such categories are viewed as marking meaningful, fundamental, and informative differences between distinct kinds of people. This article examines the development of these essentialist intuitive theories of how the social world is structured, along with the developmental consequences of these beliefs. We first examine the processes that give rise to social essentialism, arguing that essentialism emerges as children actively attempt to make sense of their environment by relying on several basic representational and explanatory biases. These developmental processes give rise to the widespread emergence of social essentialist views in early childhood, but allow for vast variability across development and cultural contexts in the precise nature of these beliefs. We then examine what is known and still to be discovered about the implications of essentialism for stereotyping, inter-group interaction, and the development of social prejudice. We conclude with directions for future research, particularly on the theoretical payoff that could be gained by including more diverse samples of children in future developmental investigations. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1437. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1437 This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief.

Changing minds: Children's inferences about third party belief revision

By the age of 5, children explicitly represent that agents can have both true and false beliefs based on epistemic access to information (e.g., Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Children also begin to understand that agents can view identical evidence and draw different inferences from it (e.g., Carpendale & Chandler, 1996). However, much less is known about when, and under what conditions, children expect other agents to change their minds. Here, inspired by formal ideal observer models of learning, we investigate children's expectations of the dynamics that underlie third parties' belief revision. We introduce an agent who has prior beliefs about the location of a population of toys and then observes evidence that, from an ideal observer perspective, either does, or does not justify revising those beliefs. We show that children's inferences on behalf of third parties are consistent with the ideal observer perspective, but not with a number of alternative possibilities, including that children expect other agents to be influenced only by their prior beliefs, only by the sampling process, or only by the observed data. Rather, children integrate all three factors in determining how and when agents will update their beliefs from evidence.

Evoking vigilance: Would you (dis)trust a scientist who discusses ethical implications of research in a science blog?

The experimental studies presented here investigated whether discussing ethical implications of preliminary scientific results in a science blog would impact blog readers' perception of the responsible scientist blogger's epistemic trustworthiness (on the dimensions expertise, integrity, and benevolence). They also investigated whether it made a difference in who had brought forward the ethics aspects: the responsible scientist blogger or another expert. Results indicate that by the mere introduction of ethics, people infer something about the blogger's communicative intentions: Introducing ethical aspects seems to raise vigilance about an expert's benevolence and integrity. Moreover, ratings of epistemic trustworthiness differed depending on who added ethical arguments: If ethics were introduced by the scientist blogger himself, his benevolence and integrity were rated higher than when ethics were introduced by another expert. These results are relevant for science bloggers, science communicators, and researchers who study laypeople's understanding of epistemic uncertainty within science.

Success inhibits preschoolers' ability to establish selective trust

A number of studies have shown that preschoolers make inferences about potential informants based on the informants' past behavior, selectively trusting an informant who has been helpful in the past, for example, over one who has been unhelpful. Here we used a hiding game to show that 4- and 5-year-olds' selective trust can also be influenced by inferences they make about their own abilities. Children do not prefer a previously helpful informant over a previously unhelpful one when informant helpfulness is decoupled from children's success in finding hidden objects (Studies 1 and 3). Indeed, children do not seem to track informant helpfulness when their success at finding hidden objects has never depended on it (Study 2). A single failure to find a hidden object when offered information by the unhelpful informant can, however, lead them to selectively trust the previously helpful one later (Study 4). Children's selective trust is based not only on differences between informants but also on their sense of illusory control-their inferences about whether they need assistance from those informants in the first place.

The selective social learner as an agent of cultural group selection

Developmental research characterizes even the youngest learners as critical and selective, capable of preserving or culling cultural information on the bases of informant accuracy, reasoning, or coherence. We suggest that Richerson et al. adjust their account of social learning in cultural group selection (CGS) by taking into consideration the role of the selective learner in the cultural inheritance system.

Preschoolers' credulity toward misinformation from ingroup versus outgroup speakers

The current research examined preschoolers' credulity toward misinformation from ingroup versus outgroup speakers. Experiment 1 showed that when searching for a hidden toy, Caucasian English monolingual 4-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of a race-and-accent ingroup speaker, despite their firsthand observations of the hiding event, but were skeptical when the false testimony was provided by a race-and-accent outgroup speaker. In the same experiment, 3-year-olds were credulous toward the false testimony of both speakers. Experiment 2 showed that when the false testimony was provided by a same-race-only or same-accent-only speaker, 4-year-olds were not particularly credulous or skeptical. The findings are discussed in relation to how intergroup bias might contribute to the selective credulity in the 4-year-olds as well as the factors that might explain the indiscriminate credulity in the 3-year-olds.