Poster #196 - You Don’t Know Words but do you Know Actions?: Domain Specificity in Selective Trust

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Us humans are social learners as we continuously learn through interactions with others. However, successful learning from others entails the ability to filter correct from incorrect information. We do this based on prior experiences with, for example, others’ competencies, and know that competencies are typically domain-specific rather than domain-general. For example, being bad at baking does not necessarily translate to being bad at math.
To date, little is known about how, and when, the ability to discriminate between domain-specific competencies develops. Already toddlers begin to selectively learn novel information from people they trust over those they do not trust. However, they still do this in a domain-general framework where incompetence in one domain is perceived as a general incompetence across all domains. By the age of four, children display a more fine-grained understanding of other peoples’ competencies and seem to have switched to a domain-specific framework. To further investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a combined behavioral and eye-tracking study in children at two, three and four years of age. Children were assigned to one of four conditions in which they were familiarized with an either competent or incompetent model in one of two domains (action of language). Afterwards all children were taught novel actions (four-step action sequence) and novel words (pseudoword-object pairing) from the model. Eye-tracking data from 73 4-year-olds suggests that indeed, at this age, children employ a domain-specific account. A two-way analysis of variance on the factors domain and competence yielded no main effects, but an interaction effect, F(1,69) = 4.14, p = 0.046, p2 = 0.057. Children are better at learning novel words from competent (M = 0.13, SD = 0.39) over incompetent speakers (M = 0.084, SD = 0.31), t(34) = 2.15, p = 0.039, d = 0.74, but do not make this distinction for competent (M = 0.091, SD = 0.33) and incompetent actors (M = 0.12, SD = 0.35), t(35) = -0.7, p = 0.49, d = -0.24. Data from all three age-groups will be presented, comparing eye-tracking data with behavioral data. Furthermore, implications for cognitive mechanisms involved in the development of selective trust across the domains of action and language will be discussed.

Authors

• Julia Brehm, University of Zurich
  Presenting Author

• anja gampe, university of zurich
  Non-Presenting Author

• Moritz M Daum, University of Zurich
  Non-Presenting Author