Children’s Utilization of Shared Information Across Contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Humans share information with one another, which allows us to accumulate knowledge about the world. However, shared information is unhelpful without the ability to implement it. Here, we present research examining children’s utilization of shared information in both epistemic and non-epistemic contexts. Rather than passively receiving new information, these papers show that children are active agents who evaluate and apply shared information.

Paper 1 examined children’s selective trust of shared information and found that children begin attending to the quality of a speaker’s reasoning at age 4. Paper 2 examined how telling versus showing children information about food affects children’s eating behavior. The paper found that verbal and non-verbal information had similar effects on children’s acceptance of a new food. Paper 3 examined how a speaker’s fluency (e.g., saying “um”) affects children’s interpretation of shared information and found that children use fluency to make inferences about others’ preferences and competency. Paper 4 examined how emotional information shapes children’s social evaluations and found that children are sensitive to the valence and content of emotional information in their choices of social partners. Furthermore, children’s experience with social distancing due to COVID-19 shaped their responses to negative emotional information.

The four presentations examine children from the preschool years into middle childhood, employ a rich set of methodologies, and transcend the utilization of shared information in any one domain. Together, these papers demonstrate that children use shared information to guide their behaviors and social evaluations within a broad range of contexts.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Ashley Shea Ransom, University of Toronto

Individual Presentations

• The Developmental Origins of Discourse: How Children Revise Their Beliefs in Light of Verbally Communicated Reasons - Presenting Author: Hanna Schleihauf, Utrecht University; Non-Presenting Author: Esther Herrmann, University of Portsmouth; Non-Presenting Author: Julia Fischer, Deutsches Primatenzentrum; Non-Presenting Author: Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley

• Show or Tell: Children’s Learning About Food From Action vs. Speech - Presenting Author: Jasmine M. DeJesus, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Non-Presenting Author: Shruthi Venkatesh, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Children Use Speech Disfluencies to Make Social Inferences - Presenting Author: Ben Morris, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel Yurovsky, Carnegie Mellon University; Non-Presenting Author: Alex Shaw, University of Chicago

• Emotional Information Shapes Children’s Social Evaluations - Presenting Author: Ashley Shea Ransom, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Adam Anderson, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Eve De Rosa, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Lin Bian, University of Chicago