1-026 - Cues to Selective Trust in Infants and Toddlers

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

A substantial part of our knowledge comes from other people. This dependence on others makes us epistemically vulnerable to purposefully misleading or accidentally wrong information. Multiple studies show that the ability to discount erroneous information and detect deception is present in preschoolers (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). The origins and limits of this capacity, however, are less clear. Recent evidence suggests that accuracy-monitoring capacities are present in 8-month-olds (Tummeltshammer et al., 2014) and that 18-month-olds register informants’ verbal reliability (e.g., Brooker & Poulin-Dubois, 2013). Yet, in deceptive contexts, children often trust people indiscriminately (e.g., Jaswal et al., 2010). Our symposium attempts to shed light on these issues with new evidence on children’s developing selective learning given informants’ verbal statements, actions, and emotional expressions.

The first speaker will present evidence for 18-month-olds’ selective trust in the context of word learning. Toddlers exhibited significantly better learning from a reliable than an unreliable informant. The second speaker will present experiments in which 14-month-olds preferred to imitate actions of an unconfident but competent informant to a confident but incompetent informant. In the absence of competence cues, infants tended to trust the confident informant. The third speaker will present work showing that 18-24-month-olds are developing sensitivity to interlocutor’s emotional reliability. Together these studies suggest that infants and toddlers possess the ability to discriminate reliable from unreliable informants and to interpret social cues. The discussant will offer different theoretical interpretations of the presented results, and propose implications for the mechanisms of children’s selective trust.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Elena Luchkina, Brown University

• Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota

Discussant

• Dare Ann Baldwin, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• Eighteen-month-olds use speakers’ accuracy information to make judgments about novel labels - Presenting Author: Elena Luchkina, Brown University; David M Sobel, Brown University; James L Morgan, Brown Univ

• Fourteen-month-olds’ imitation is influenced more strongly by a model’s competence than by a model’s certainty - Presenting Author: Norbert Zmyj, Ruhr-Universität Bochum; David Buttelmann, University of Erfurt

• Infants’ learning and prosocial behaviors are guided by the past reliability of adults’ affective signals - Presenting Author: Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia Univ; Patricia E Brosseau-Liard, University of Ottawa; Sabrina Sarah Chiarella, Concordia University