Poster #75 - Is Means of Communication a Potential Contributor to Children’s Differential Performance in Epistemic Vigilance Tasks?

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Children have a propensity to trust others (Mascaro & Sperber, 2009), but doing so indiscriminately leaves them vulnerable to deception from malevolent individuals. Thus, Ding et al. (2022) proposed a training method to foster epistemic vigilance in young children. Epistemic vigilance is the shrewdness in identifying misinformation from communicated content (Johnson, 1997), and it is commonly measured with object-naming tasks (Koenig et al., 2004) and/or object-location tasks (Robinson et al., 1999). The former requires children to guess the labels of novel objects, while the latter involves searching for an object from two containers, based on the verbal testimony of a deceptive puppet. However, in Ding et al. (2022), deceptive training was useful for object-naming task but not object-location task. It is possible that the difference in performance is due to different means of communication (verbal vs. nonverbal) used for different epistemic vigilance tasks – a nonverbal cue (e.g., pointing) can be harder for children to resist than a verbal one (Couillard & Woodward, 1999). To answer this question, we presented all epistemic vigilance tasks verbally in this study and examined whether there are still significant differences between the two tasks. A total of 131 three-year-old children (M = 41.47 months, SD = 2.48) participated in the study. Modelling Ding et al. (2022), children were randomly assigned to the experimental (strategic behaviour training) or the control condition (conservation training). In the experimental condition, children were explicitly taught to lie in a zero-sum hide-and-seek paradigm, so as to develop the intention to deceive others for their self-benefit. In the control condition, children were taught conservation rules. According to this communication means account, we hypothesised that children in the experimental condition would see more improvements in both epistemic vigilance tasks after training, compared to those in the control condition. After excluding children who had reached ceiling performance in epistemic vigilance tasks before training, results revealed an interaction effect: children in the experimental condition improved significantly more than those in the control condition in the object-naming task (F(1, 62) = 5.04, p = .028) after training, but this trend was not evident for the object-location task (F(1, 62) = 0.11, p = .744). The current study replicated the results in Ding et al. (2022), and ruled out the communication means account. Instead, a more plausible explanation lies in the nature of the tasks – object-naming task constitutes a semantic task while object-location task represents an episodic task. Past research showed that children’s tolerance for error in semantic information is lower than that of the episodic information. Children readily generalised their distrust towards an informant who committed a semantic error to other contexts, but do not for episodic errors (Stephens & Koenig, 2015). These findings informed on the role of means of communication in studying children’s epistemic vigilance, and further confirmed the effectiveness of strategic behaviour training in fostering children’s epistemic vigilance (specifically the object-naming task) found in Ding et al. (2022).

Authors

• Shi Wei Ong, National University of Singapore
  Presenting Author

• Xiao Pan Ding, National University of Singapore

• Weibin Glynis Lam