Poster #124 - The Impact of Informant Disagreement on Children’s Selective Learning

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Much like scientific journal reviewers, children employ discerning methods when considering the reliability of others’ claims. Selective learning refers to an individual’s propensity to rely on one source of information over another. In the breadth of research that has been conducted on young children’s selective social learning (see Markson & Luo, 2020, for a recent review), there is an important gap in the literature: the effect of overt interpersonal disagreement. The goal of this study is to empirically test whether 5- to 8-year-old children (N=96) selectively learn from individuals demonstrating cues of overt disagreement, and whether the way disagreement is expressed affects children’s learning. Based on methods that have been successfully applied in other selective learning paradigms, two informants will provide contradictory novel object labels to unfamiliar objects. Across test conditions, one informant will provide claims in a neutral manner and the other informant will consistently and explicitly disagree. Then, the child will be asked to endorse one of the provided labels. In Condition 1, the disagreeing informant will voice disagreement in a neutral, polite manner (e.g., Informant 1: “I think it’s a Mido”, Informant 2: “I disagree, I think it’s a Toma”). In Condition 2, the disagreeing informant will undermine the other informant’s claim before making their own (e.g., Informant 1: “I think it’s a Mido”, Informant 2: “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, I think it’s a Toma”). A Control Condition in which no overt statement of informant disagreement is present will be used to assess whether children demonstrate bias towards one informant or another. Across all three conditions, one-sample t-tests will be conducted to compare children’s scores on the selective learning task (range 0-6) to a chance score (3); with higher scores indicating reliance on the overtly disagreeing informant. Hypothesis 1 posits that in Condition 1, children will endorse object labels provided by the disagreeing informant significantly above chance level as children will interpret disagreement as an assertive confidence or social dominance cue. However, we expect that children will interpret interpersonal disagreement presented in Condition 2 as an antisocial cue and will endorse the labels provided by the neutral informant more often than chance (Hypothesis 2). We expect chance performance in the Control Condition (Hypothesis 3). Furthermore, Pearson bivariate correlations will also be calculated to test for developmental differences in children’s selective learning. It is predicted that children’s age in months will be positively and significantly correlated with their endorsement of the disagreeing informant in Condition 1 (Hypothesis 4) and negatively correlated in Condition 2 (Hypothesis 5), as older children, on average, demonstrate more refined mental state understanding. In all, the findings from this study have the potential to curate a better understanding of how children interpret the dependability of different knowledge sources.

Authors

• Sophie Fobert, Université d'Ottawa
  Presenting Author

• Emma Pellegrini

• Patricia E Brosseau-Liard, University of Ottawa