Gaining knowledge via other minds: children's flexible trust in others as sources of information

Children transition from simple associations to explicitly reasoned social learning strategies between age four and eight

To differentiate the use of simple associations from use of explicitly reasoned selective social learning, we can look for age-related changes in children’s behaviour that might signify a switch from one social learning strategy to the other. We presented 4- to 8-year-old children visiting a zoo in Scotland (N = 109) with a task in which the perceptual access of two informants was determined by the differing opacity of two screens of similar visual appearance during a hiding event. Initially success could be achieved by forming an association or inferring a rule based on salient visual (but causally irrelevant) cues. However, following a switch in the scenario, success required explicit reasoning about informants’ potential to provide valuable information based on their perceptual access. Following the switch, older children were more likely to select a knowledgeable informant. This suggests that some younger children who succeeded in the pre-switch trials had inferred rules or formed associations based on superficial, yet salient, visual cues, whereas older children made the link between perceptual access and the potential to inform. This late development and apparent cognitive challenge are consistent with proposals that such capacities are linked to the distinctiveness of human cumulative culture.

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.

Children's evaluation of verified and unverified claims

Critical to children's learning is the ability to judiciously select what information to accept-to use as the basis for learning and inference-and what information to reject. This becomes especially difficult in a world increasingly inundated with information, where children must carefully reason about the process by which claims are made in order to acquire accurate knowledge. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 120) understand that factual claims based on verified evidence are more acceptable than claims that have not been sufficiently verified. We found that even at preschool age, children evaluated verified claims as more acceptable than insufficiently verified claims, and that the extent to which they did so was related to their explicit understanding, as evident in their explanations of why those claims were more or less acceptable. These experiments lay the groundwork for an important line of research studying the roots and development of this foundational critical thinking skill.

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.

Humor and preschoolers' trust: Sensitivity to changing intentions

This research demonstrates that preschoolers (a) avoid trusting informants with humorous intentions when learning novel information and (b) flexibly consider current intentions rather than initial intentions when determining who to trust. In Study 1 (N=61), 3- and 4-year-olds based their trust on intentions or intentional cues alone, trusting a sincere informant over a joker, even when no prior accuracy or inaccuracy was displayed. In Study 2 (N=32), 3- and 4-year-olds flexibly based their trust on the informants' current intentions or intentional cues rather than their initial ones. Children trusted a sincere informant, who originally joked, over a joker, who was originally sincere. In Study 3 (N=89), 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds tracked changing intentions, and not just intentional cues, in determining who to trust. Children trusted an informant who joked during training trials but was sincere during test trials over an informant who was ignorant during training trials and was sincere during test trials. However, if the ignorant informant became knowledgeable and the joker continued to joke, the pattern reversed. This is the first study to show that preschoolers consider intentions to joke when learning information. This is also the first study to show that preschoolers do not see trust as stable but rather see it as a function of changing intentions.

Theory of mind selectively predicts preschoolers' knowledge-based selective word learning

Children can selectively attend to various attributes of a model, such as past accuracy or physical strength, to guide their social learning. There is a debate regarding whether a relation exists between theory-of-mind skills and selective learning. We hypothesized that high performance on theory-of-mind tasks would predict preference for learning new words from accurate informants (an epistemic attribute), but not from physically strong informants (a non-epistemic attribute). Three- and 4-year-olds (N = 65) completed two selective learning tasks, and their theory-of-mind abilities were assessed. As expected, performance on a theory-of-mind battery predicted children's preference to learn from more accurate informants but not from physically stronger informants. Results thus suggest that preschoolers with more advanced theory of mind have a better understanding of knowledge and apply that understanding to guide their selection of informants. This work has important implications for research on children's developing social cognition and early learning.

Children's picture interpretation: Appearance or intention?

Pictures are defined by their creator’s intentions and resemblance to their real world referents. Here we examine whether young children follow a realist route (e.g., focusing on how closely pictures resemble their referents) or intentional route (e.g., focusing on what a picture is intended to represent by its artist) when identifying a picture’s referent. In 3 experiments, we contrasted an artist’s intention with her picture’s appearance to investigate children’s use of appearance and intentional cues. In Experiment 1, children aged 3–4 and 5–6 years (N = 151) were presented with 4 trials of 3-object arrays (e.g., a pink duck, a blue duck, and a teddy). The experimenter photographed or drew 1 of the objects (e.g., blue duck), however, the subsequent picture depicted the referent in grayscale (black and white condition) or the color of its shape-matched object, for example, a pink duck (color change condition). Children were asked 3 questions regarding the identity of the pictures; responses were guided by intentional cues in the black and white condition, but appearance in the color change condition. Experiment 2 confirmed that appearance responses were not due to the artist’s changing knowledge state. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with adult participants. Together, these studies show that children and adults are neither strictly realist nor intentional route followers. They are realists until resemblance cues fail, at which point they defer to intentional cues.

Take it as read: origins of trust in knowledge gained from print

The ability to read opens up the possibility of learning about the world indirectly via print sources, providing a powerful new opportunity for children who have for years learned effectively from what people tell them. We compared children's trust in printed versus oral information. We also examined whether children who showed preferential trust in an informant with print assumed that the informant was still reliable about new information offered without print support. Children (N=89 aged 3-6 years) received conflicting suggestions from two dolls about which picture showed an unfamiliar target. Only one doll's suggestion referred to a printed label read aloud. Prereaders, despite their exposure to print and presumed experience of others treating print sources as authoritative, showed no clear evidence of preferential trust in the suggestions with print support. Early readers, in contrast, consistently preferred the suggestions with print support. Importantly, despite having treated the doll with print as having a history of accuracy, early readers no longer showed trust in that doll when it subsequently had no print support. Children at the very earliest stages of reading treated the doll with print appropriately as having gained only specific information from the print sources.