The Right Stuff: Preschoolers Generalize Reliability Across Communicative Domains When Informants Show Semantic (Not Episodic) Knowledge

Do children interpret informants' confidence as person-specific or situational?

Children prefer to learn from confident rather than hesitant informants. However, it is unclear how children interpret confidence cues: these could be construed as strictly situational indicators of an informant's current certainty about the information they are conveying, or alternatively as person-specific indicators of how "knowledgeable" someone is across situations. In three studies, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 1: N = 51, Experiment 3: N = 41) and 2- and 3-year-olds (Experiment 2: N = 80) saw informants differing in confidence. Each informant's confidence cues either remained constant throughout the experiment, changed between the history and test phases, or were present during the history but not test phase. Results suggest that 4- and 5-year-olds primarily treat confidence cues as situational, whereas there is uncertainty around younger preschoolers' interpretation due to low performance.

Detecting lies through others' eyes: Children use perceptual access cues to evaluate listeners' beliefs about informants' deception

Children are often third-party observers of conversations between informants and receivers. Although 5- and 6-year-olds can identify and reject informants' false testimony, it remains unclear whether they expect others to do the same. Accurately assessing others' impressions of informants and their testimony in a conversational setting is essential for children's navigation of the social world. Using a novel second-order lie detection task, the current study examined whether 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 74; Mage = 69 months) take receivers' epistemic states into account when predicting whether a receiver would think an informant is truthful or deceptive. We pitted children's firsthand observations of reality against informants' false testimony while manipulating receivers' perceptual access to a sticker-hiding event. Results showed that when the receiver had perceptual access and was knowledgeable, children predicted that the receiver would think the informant is lying. Critically, when the receiver lacked perceptual access and was ignorant, children were significantly more likely to predict that the receiver would think the informant is telling the truth. Second-order theory of mind and executive function strengthened this effect. Findings are interpreted using a dual-process framework and provide new insights into children's understanding of others' selective trust and susceptibility to deception.

Do preschoolers trust a competent robot pointer?

How young children learn from different informants has been widely studied. However, most studies investigate how children learn verbally conveyed information. Furthermore, most studies investigate how children learn from humans. This study sought to investigate how 3-year-old children learn from, and come to trust, a competent robot versus an incompetent human when competency is established using a pointing paradigm. During an induction phase, a robot informant pointed at a toy inside a transparent box, whereas a human pointed at an empty box. During the test phase, both agents pointed at opaque boxes. We found that young children asked the robot for help to locate a hidden toy more than the human (ask questions) and correctly identified the robot to be accurate (judgment questions). However, children equally endorsed the locations pointed at by both the robot and the human (endorse questions). This suggests that 3-year-olds are sensitive to the epistemic characteristics of the informant even when its displayed social properties are minimal.

Do I know what they know? Linking metacognition, theory of mind, and selective social learning

Young children are often dependent on learning from others and to this effect develop heuristics to help distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources. Where younger children rely heavily on social cues such as familiarity with a source to make this distinction, older children tend to rely more on an informant's competence. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that help children to select the best informant; however, some evidence points toward mechanisms such as metacognition (thinking about thinking) and theory of mind (thinking about other's thoughts) being involved. The goals of the current study were to (a) explore how the monitoring and control components of metacognition may predict selective social learning in preschoolers and (b) attempt to replicate a reported link between selective social learning and theory of mind. In Experiment 1, no relationship was observed across the measures. In Experiment 2, only selective social learning and belief reasoning were found to be related as well as when both experiments' samples were combined. No links between selective social learning and metacognition were observed in the two experiments. These results suggest that theory of mind is a stronger correlate of selective learning than metacognition in young children. The implications regarding the kind of tasks used to measure metacognition are discussed.

Social cognition and trust: Exploring the role of theory of mind and hostile attribution bias in children's skepticism of inaccurate informants

A growing body of research has examined the role of individual differences in children's selective trust. The current study was designed to explore how individual differences in theory of mind and hostile attribution bias affect children's trust. Four- and five-year-old children took part in a standard selective trust paradigm in which they had the choice between a previously inaccurate informant and an unfamiliar informant. They were also asked to interpret why the previously inaccurate informant had provided incorrect information in the past. Finally, children completed a hostile attribution bias task and a theory of mind task. Children with better theory of mind ability were more likely to defer to the unfamiliar informant on the selective trust task. Children with greater hostile attribution bias were more likely to interpret previous inaccuracy as a result of "being tricky" rather than having "made a mistake." However, these interpretations did not influence children's choices on the selective trust task. Therefore, although there is reason to believe that establishing selective trust involves both cognitive and social processes, the current study raises questions about the nature of this relationship and how children draw on different sociocognitive skills when establishing epistemic trust.