1-152 - Mechanisms of children’s belief revision

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

To engage in conceptual change and learning, children must revise beliefs about the world based on various forms of evidence. Descriptions of belief revision are ubiquitous in cognitive development. The mechanisms that underlie children’s belief revision are largely unexplained. The present symposium explores different processes that affect children’s belief revision.

The first two talks investigate the role that domain-general cognitive processes in catalyzing belief change. The first examines belief revision about defining characteristics of novel categories, manipulating children’s selective attention to specific features. Children learn task-relevant information and ignore irrelevant information, but used base rate information to generalize novel beliefs. The second talk considers how prediction-outcome mismatch monitoring may be a critical signal that prior beliefs are outdated and should be replaced with new ones. In both cases, developmental changes in domain-general capacities are conceptualized as potentially rate-limiting with respect to preschoolers’ belief revision.

The last two talks focus on how social-contextual considerations affect children’s willingness to change their beliefs. The third talk focuses on whether children are equally likely to change their beliefs when new information is presented in a fantasy versus a reality context. This work finds that embedding novel information about the physical domain in a fictional story is an effective means of promoting belief revision. The final talk shows how different forms of training about desire-based information influences belief revision about others’ desires. This work indicates that specific kinds of experiences promote belief revision about theory of mind, but potentially generalize to other domains.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chairs

• David M. Sobel, Brown University

• Mark A Sabbagh, Queen's University

Individual Presentations

• Which Beliefs Do Children Revise and When? - Presenting Author: Charles Kalish, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Processes of conceptual change in preschool-aged children: Neurobiological and computational perspectives - Presenting Author: Mark A Sabbagh, Queen's University; Kirsten Quistberg, University of Victoria / Queen's University; David M. Sobel, Brown University

• Weighing the evidence: Promoting belief revision through storybooks - Presenting Author: Patricia Ganea, University of Toronto; Kadria Simons Ghafari, University of Toronto; Caren Walker, UCSD

• Belief revision in theory of mind: Can training induce conceptual change in desire-based reasoning? - Presenting Author: Tiffany Doan, University of Waterloo; Stephanie Denison, University of Waterloo; Christopher G Lucas, University of Edinburgh; Alison Gopnik, University of California, Berkeley