“Why Does Rain Fall?” Children Prefer to Learn From an Informant Who Uses Noncircular Explanations

• In Event: Early Learning and Teaching: How Do Preschoolers Decide Who to Learn From and Who to Teach?

Abstract

To date, studies on children’s selective learning have largely focused on how children use an informant’s accurate or inaccurate labeling of a familiar object (e.g., calling a shoe a ‘duck’) when subsequently deciding whom to turn to when learning a novel fact: usually a novel object’s name or function (e.g., Birch, Vauthier & Bloom, 2008; Koenig & Harris, 2005; Sobel & Corriveau, 2010). This focus on children’s evaluation of single-word utterances is surprising, given that by age three, children shift from primarily asking “what” and “where” questions, which can be answered with one-word responses, to asking “why” and “how” questions, which require longer explanations (Isaacs, 1930; Chouinard, 2007; Frazier, Gelman & Wellman, 2009).
Based on preschooler’s developing understanding of how adult explanations might guide learning, it seems likely that children would determine an informant’s future credibility by attending not only to her single-word utterances, but also to her explanations. This presentation will highlight the first set of studies aimed at exploring children’s use of explanation quality to evaluate an informant’s credibility. We focus on one potential cue that children use when evaluating explanations: argument circularity.
Across two experiments we explored 3- and 5-year-olds’ evaluation of non-circular over circular explanations, and their use of such explanations to determine informant credibility. In both experiments three- and 5-year-olds were presented with pictures of two informants and tested in two phases. In the training phase, both informants provided explanations for familiar entities. In each of 4 training trials, one informant consistently provided a non-circular explanation, whereas the other informant provided a circular explanation. Children were invited to endorse one of the two explanations.
Next, in the test phase, the two informants provided conflicting information about novel entities. In the novel explanations task, both informants provided conflicting non-circular explanations about a novel object. In the novel labels task, informants provided conflicting labels for a novel object. Finally, in the explicit judgment task, children were asked to explicitly judge the credibility of the two informants.
Results indicated that whereas 5-year-olds demonstrated a selective preference for non-circular over circular explanations (Experiment 1: long explanations; Experiment 2: short explanations), 3-year-olds only demonstrated a preference for the non-circular when the explanations were shortened (Experiment 2). Children’s evaluation of the explanations extended to their inferences about the informants’ future credibility. Both age groups demonstrated a selective preference for learning novel explanations from an informant who had previously provided non-circular explanations – although only 5-year-olds also preferred to learn novel labels from her.
During the preschool years, children become increasingly sophisticated questioners, thereby prompting a rapidly-expanding exposure to multi-word explanations. Our research provides evidence that children are capable of assessing an entire explanation in judging its quality. Perhaps even more compelling, children not only monitor explanations for quality, but they also use this information to make judgments about an informant’s future credibility.

Author

• Katelyn E. Kurkul, Merrimack College