2-073 - Selective Social Learning: Children’s Epistemic Understanding of Credibility Cues

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Young children use various cues (e.g., a model’s past accuracy or confidence) to determine trustworthy sources of information. But how sophisticated is children’s understanding? Do children appreciate what these cues signify about a source’s knowledge or are they using these cues without understanding their nuances? This symposium brings together work that examines children’s epistemic understanding of different credibility cues.

The first paper examines the role of theory of mind in preschoolers’ selective social learning. Mental state understanding, over and above age, predicted selective preference to learn from a previously accurate source. The second paper explores whether preschoolers’ apply cues relevant to one dimension (benevolence) to another dimension (competence). A unidirectional relationship was found in which judgments about informants’ competence was influenced by their level of benevolence. The third paper investigates whether preschoolers attend to the quality of information provided or the outcome of the interaction. When the outcome is equal, preschoolers do not discriminate between high and low quality informants. The final paper examines whether children appreciate that an informant’s confidence should be based on underlying knowledge. Children developed skepticism of an unjustifiably confident model and instead preferred a justifiably uncertain source.

Collectively these papers suggest that children are remarkably sensitive to a variety of cues that facilitate social learning and importantly show that although some aspects of selective social learning are related to early ‘theory of mind’, others require a more nuanced understanding of the mind that is not fully-developed in the preschool-period.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Rachel Severson, University of British Columbia

Individual Presentations

• Theory of mind skills selectively predict children’s use of epistemic cues to guide their social learning - Presenting Author: Patricia E Brosseau-Liard, University of Ottawa; Danielle Penney, Concordia University; Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia Univ

• Naive Epistemology: Children use social cues when determining what others know - Presenting Author: Asheley R Landrum, University of Louisville; Candice Mills, Univ of Texas at Dallas; Angie Johnston, Yale University; Amelia Dawne Pflaum, University of Texas at Dallas

• Do children monitor informants for the quality of their information, or for successful outcomes? - Presenting Author: Carolyn M Palmquist, Amherst College; Vikram K Jaswal, University of Virginia

• Discerning minds: Older children become skeptical of an unjustifiably confident informant - Presenting Author: Rachel Severson, University of British Columbia; Susan A J Birch, Univ of British Columbia