Evidence that Two-Year-Old Children are Sensitive to Information Presented in Arguments

Children recognize and reject favoritism in norm enforcement

The impartial enforcement of norms and laws is a hallmark of fair societies, yet partial, unequal norm enforcement is common, for example as a result of corruption. While children condemn norm violations and value impartiality in resource allocation contexts, children's understanding of unequal norm enforcement is currently underexplored. In three vignette studies, we investigated 4- to 8-year-old's (N = 192) developing recognition and condemnation of unequal norm enforcement, which presupposes a sensitivity to impartiality as a meta-norm. Children evaluated the actions of characters who enforced different norms equally or unequally. From age 5, children disapproved of unequal norm enforcement but approved of unequal treatment when justified (Study 1). Children of all ages accepted a lack of punishment when applied equally to all transgressors, suggesting that their negative evaluations of unequal norm enforcement were specifically guided by the element of partiality and not the desire to see transgressors sanctioned (Study 2). Further, children aged 6 years and older were sensitive to the reasons behind unequal punishment, condemning instances of favoritism while accepting selective leniency due to mitigating circumstances (Study 3). The findings show that, from around 5 to 6 years of age, children condemn unequal sanctions for equal transgressions, thereby demonstrating a deep appreciation of impartiality as a foundational principle of fair norm enforcement.

Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers' Processing of Novel Communicative Cues

Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative cues tend to have low processing costs and high cognitive benefits. We tested this hypothesis in three studies in which toddlers (N = 90) searched for a reward hidden in one of several containers. In all studies, an adult communicated the reward's location with an unfamiliar and ambiguous cue. We manipulated the processing costs (operationalized as inferential chain length) and cognitive benefits (operationalized as informativeness) of the possible interpretations of the cues. Toddlers processing of novel communicative cues were guided by expectations of low processing costs (Study 1) and high cognitive benefits (Studies 2 and 3). More specifically, toddlers treated novel cues as if they were easy to process, informative, and accurate, even when provided with repeated evidence to the contrary. These results indicate that, from toddlerhood onward, expectations of cognitive utility shape the processing of novel communicative cues. These data also reveal that toddlers, who are in the process of learning the language and communicative conventions of people around them, exert a pressure favoring cognitive efficiency in communicative systems.

Critical Thinking in Ethical and Neutral Settings in Gifted Children and Non-Gifted Children

The present study examined the performance on five phases of critical thinking in gifted and nongifted children in two settings: ethical and neutral. Ninety-one children, 32 gifted (8-10 years old), 32 normally developing children matched for chronological age (8-10 years old) and 27 normally developing children matched for mental age (12-13 years old) completed critical thinking tasks. The findings confirmed that intellectually gifted children had higher critical thinking capacity than typically developing children. The results reveal that the basic factor determining best performances in critical thinking is mental age and not chronological age. However, critical thinking ability was the same in ethical and neutral settings. Analysis of the phases of critical thinking show that the first and the third phase, clarification and evaluation, specifically differentiates gifted from nongifted children. These phases refer to the ability to understand the type of problem rapidly and to assess the credibility of statements and to assess the logical strength of the actual or intended inferential relationships among statements, descriptions, questions or other forms of representation.

How children revise their beliefs in light of reasons

We investigate how the ability to respond appropriately to reasons provided in discourse develops in young children. In Study 1 (N = 58, Germany, 26 girls), 4- and 5-, but not 3-year-old children, differentiated good from bad reasons. In Study 2 (N = 131, Germany, 64 girls), 4- and 5-year-old children considered both the strength of evidence for their initial belief and the quality of socially provided reasons for an alternative view when deciding whether to change their minds. Study 3 (N = 80, the United States, 42 girls, preregistered) shows that 4- and 5-year-old children also consider meta-reasons (reasons about reasons) in their belief revision. These results suggest that by age 4, children possess key critical thinking capacities for participating in public discourse.

Preschool children's use of meta-talk to make rational collaborative decisions

In collaborative decision-making, partners compare reasons behind conflicting proposals through meta-talk. We investigated UK-based preschoolers' (mixed socioeconomic status) use of meta-talk (Data collection: 2018-2020). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old peer dyads (N = 128, 61 girls) heard conflicting claims about an animal from two informants. One prefaced her claim with "I know"; the other with "I think". Dyads identified the more reliable informant through meta-talk ("She said she knows"). In Study 2, 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 64, 34 girls) searched for a toy with an adult partner making incorrect proposals. Children refuted this through reporting what they had witnessed (It cannot be there because "I saw it move", "she moved it"). In preschool period, children start using meta-talk to make rational collaborative decisions.

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.

Violations of expectation trigger infants to search for explanations

Infants look longer and explore more following violations-of-expectation, but the reasons for these surprise-induced behaviors are unclear. One possibility is that expectancy violations heighten arousal generally, thereby increasing infants' post-surprise activity. Another possibility is that infants' exploration reflects the search for an explanation for the surprising event. We tested these alternatives in three experiments. First in Experiment 1 we confirmed that seeing an object violate expectations (by passing through a solid wall) increased infants' exploration of the surprising object, relative to when no expectancy violation was seen. Then in Experiment 2 we measured infants' exploration after they had seen the same violation event, but then an explanation for the event was provided (the wall was revealed to have a large hole in it). We found that providing this explanation abolished infants' surprise-induced exploration. In Experiment 3 we replicated this effect. Furthermore, we found that the longer infants looked at the explanation, the greater their reversal in exploratory preference (i.e., the more they ignored the surprising object). These findings demonstrate that preverbal infants both seek and recognize explanations for surprising events.

Developmental differences in preschoolers' definition assessment and production

Children are able to assess the quality of information presented to them, most notably in the domains of causal explanations and arguments. However, children are also presented with another form of verbal information-definitions. Very little empirical work has investigated how children assess and produce definitions. Two experiments explored preschoolers' comprehension and production of definitions. In Experiment 1, a selective trust paradigm was used to assess 3-year-olds' (n = 28) and 5-year-olds' (n = 28) endorsements of informative and uninformative definitions. Participants were provided with two informants: one who always provided a circular definition (e.g., "Silly means when you are silly") and one who always provided a noncircular definition (e.g., "Silly means when you are goofy"). The 5-year-olds endorsed noncircular definitions over circular definitions for both frequent and infrequent words, but they chose to learn only from informants who provided information about infrequent words. The 3-year-olds, on the other hand, did not systematically endorse either definition type. In Experiment 2, new groups of 3-year-olds (n = 25) and 5-year-olds (n = 24) were asked to provide definitions, and their responses were coded for correctness and circularity. Results demonstrated that 5-year-olds provided more definitions than 3-year-olds. In addition, 5-year-olds provided more noncircular definitions than 3-year-olds for infrequent words but not for frequent words. Together, the results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that children's understanding of definitions emerges during the preschool period. This work presents an important first step in addressing an understudied facet of lexical development.

Seeing thought: a cultural cognitive tool

The present paper, which is the first of two twin opinion papers, offers a theoretical approach of literacy and critical literacy in relation to language, thought, and reasoning. Literacy acquisition and practice proceed through two stages, which partially overlap in terms of processing abilities: the first is achieved when the learner becomes a skilled reader and writer, characterized by automatic word processing; the second, when reading comprehension and written production become expert instruments in the communication of progressively more abstract and sophisticated, but always linguistically-mediated, knowledge and ideas. The destiny of literacy, depending on educational and social factors, is thus to be to fused with language, thought and reasoning. Oral language becomes literate language; and our cognitive activity becomes—as indicated in the title—“seeing thought”, which paves the way, we will argue, for reasoning skills. Making of literacy an epistemic and social tool of our own collective history requires a critical stance that raises itself and ourselves to a stage called critical literacy. In this paper we focus on some of the favorable and unfavorable factors influencing this achievement. The main challenge is to bring literate cognition up to the capacity of choosing between accept and verify, between belief and disbelief, by weighting evidence and reasoning, by arguing and debunking errors and falsities. Accordingly, our objective is essentially to narrate how literacy gives birth to critical literacy and explain why, at the end of this process, critical literacy becomes hard to distinguish from thinking and reasoning.

Preschoolers refer to direct and indirect evidence in their collaborative reasoning

Collaborative reasoning requires partners to evaluate options and the evidence for or against each option. We investigated whether preschoolers can explain why one option is best (direct reasons) and why the other option is not (indirect reasons), looking at both problems that have a correct answer and those that require choosing the better option. In Study 1, both age groups produced direct reasons equally frequently in both problems. However, 5-year-olds produced indirect reasons more often than 3-year-olds, especially when there was a correct answer. In Study 2 with a nonverbal task with a correct answer, 3-year-olds produced indirect reasons more often than in Study 1, although 5-year-olds' indirect reasons were more efficiently stated. These results demonstrate that even 3-year-olds, and even nonverbally, can point out to a partner a fact that constitutes a reason for them to arrive at a correct joint decision.

Young Children's Ability to Produce Valid and Relevant Counter-Arguments

In collaborative problem solving, children produce and evaluate arguments for proposals. We investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 192) can produce and evaluate arguments against those arguments (i.e., counter-arguments). In Study 1, each child within a peer dyad was privately given a reason to prefer one over another solution to a task. One child, however, was given further information that would refute the reasoning of their partner. Five-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, identified and produced valid and relevant counter-arguments. In Study 2, 3-year-olds were given discourse training (discourse that contrasted valid and invalid counter-arguments) and then given the same problem-solving tasks. After training, 3-year-olds could also identify and produce valid and relevant counter-arguments. Thus, participating in discourse about reasons facilitates children's counter-argumentation.

Trust me, I'm a competent expert: Developmental differences in children's use of an expert's explanation quality to infer trustworthiness

In this study, we examined how 3-, 4-, 5-, and 7-year-old children respond when informants who are labeled as experts fail to provide high-quality explanations about phenomena within their realm of expertise. We found that 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds discounted their initial trust in an expert who provided low-quality explanations in a task related to the expert's area of expertise. The 5-year-olds' distrust of the expert who provided low-quality explanations also generalized to additional learning tasks. When an expert provided explanations consistent with the expert's labeled expertise, 5-year-olds maintained a similar level of trust in the expert, but 7-year-olds displayed an increased level of trust in the expert within the expert's area of expertise. We did not find consistent preferences in 3-year-olds' judgments. We discuss the implications of these findings for age-based differences in children's relative weighting of trait-based versus real-time epistemic cues when evaluating informant reliability.