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

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

In this symposium we will discuss new experimental findings that significantly advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying selective trust and learning in childhood. Three speakers will present evidence that these phenomena are rooted in sophisticated social reasoning, including reasoning about social categories, epistemological understanding, and continuing revisions of the reliability status of individuals who taught new information in the past. These findings provide strong support to the hypothesis that children’s selective trust and learning are driven by integrating new information with existing social knowledge (see Sobel & Kushnir, 2013).
Speaker 1 will show that 27-month-olds preferentially rely on communicative signals generated by adults but not by their age peers despite paying equal attention to adults’ and age peers’ actions. These results suggest that low-level attentional mechanisms do not explain the differences in toddlers’ trust and that they must be making inferences about informants’ epistemic competence.
Speaker 2 will present evidence that 4-6-year-olds not only selectively learn new information from previously accurate speakers, but also make retrospective reliability judgments and revise their knowledge based on new accuracy data. The results of this investigation also show that preschoolers’ selective retention of new knowledge cannot be explained by the increased memory demands associated with processing inaccurate information.
Speaker 3 will talk about the findings indicating that 4-8-year-olds engage their epistemological understanding to evaluate informants’ predictive reasoning with probabilistic data and use these evaluations in their reliability inferences. These findings also show that children’s specific epistemological styles reflect their parents’ beliefs about knowledge.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Elena Luchkina, Brown University

Discussant

• Vikram K. Jaswal, University of Virginia

Individual Presentations

• When do toddlers prefer adults to peers as informants? - Presenting Author: Gregor Kachel, FH Potsdam; Non-Presenting Author: Robert Hepach, Leipzig University; Non-Presenting Author: Richard Moore, Berlin School of Mind and Brain; Non-Presenting Author: Michael Tomasello, Duke University

• Preschoolers retrospectively re-evaluate word meanings upon learning that their source was unreliable - Presenting Author: Elena Luchkina, Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University; Non-Presenting Author: David Sobel, Brown University

• Epistemological Understanding in Action: Children’s Evaluations of Reasoners and Reasons - Presenting Author: Sarah Suarez, University of Minnesota; Non-Presenting Author: Melissa A Koenig, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota