When do toddlers prefer adults to peers as informants?

• In Event: 2-140 - Social mechanisms of selective trust and selective learning in childhood: New evidence and implications

Integrative Statement

Throughout the second year of life, infants’ and toddlers’ encounters with age-mates provide opportunities for social learning that are qualitatively different from the structured interactions they have with adult caregivers. The distinct social affordances that interactions with peer and adult partners provide are likely to shape the expectations and motivations with which young children will engage in both social contexts subsequently. By testing two-year-olds with adults and age-mates under matched conditions, we might be able to elicit differences in behavior that are reflective of such early acquired learning biases and that have the potential to inform a variety of debates on social learning, social categorization and communicative development broadly construed.
Using this approach, my colleagues and I tested same-sex dyads of 27-month-olds in an object-choice task requiring cooperative communication. In a hide-and-seek game, one child had to inform a naïve observer of the location of a covered toy by pointing out its hiding place. We found that children’s choice behavior was at chance even when they clearly attended a peer’s point. With an adult partner, children were above chance and significantly more likely to comply (see figure 1, left panel).
For a follow-up, we developed a new paradigm in which children play the same hide-and-seek game with videos of peers and adults in a semi-interactive set-up allowing for the employment of looking time measures and more careful control of subjects’ in-test experience. With this setup, we replicated the finding that two-year-olds are more likely to use information provided by pointing gestures from adults (see figure 1, right panel). Since we found no difference in children’s propensity to follow peer and adult pointing gestures with their gaze, the effect is unlikely to be explained by differences in the allocation of attention with peer and adult partners.
In a third study, we investigated two-year-olds’ gaze following with peer and adult models. Adapting established eye-tracking paradigms, we tested whether children would search in cued AOIs in the absence of a target (Tummeltshammer et al., 2014) and prefer to look at a cued target as opposed to a distractor (Kano & Call, 2014). In both tasks, two-year-olds did not differentiate between social contexts.
Taken together, the studies on pointing and gaze-following demonstrate that at two-years-of age, children are equally attentive to peer and adult partners but value information more when provided by adults. Thereby, they provide solid evidence that children as young as two years of age can take an interlocutor’s age into account when judging ostensively communicated testimony.
Following up on these findings, we have now adapted the interactive video set-up described above and tested how likely three-year-olds are to over-imitate instrumental actions presented by peer or adult models. Furthermore, we have re-used the gaze-stimuli from study three to test word learning with peer and adult partners. Data collection on these two projects is finished and analyses will be complete by fall 2018.

Authors

• Gregor Kachel, FH Potsdam
  Presenting Author

• Robert Hepach, Leipzig University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Richard Moore, Berlin School of Mind and Brain
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Tomasello, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author