1-035 - Developmental changes in selective trust: evidence from 3-to-8-year-olds

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Learning reliable information about the world involves the identification of reliable sources. Older preschoolers and school-aged children incorporate multiple cues into their reliability judgments. They rely on their own intuition in combination with informants’ expertise (e.g., Lane & Harris, 2015), track statistics and social cues (Bridgers et al., 2015), account for informants’ intentions (Liu et al., 2013) and group membership (Chen et al., 2012). In contrast, younger preschoolers and toddlers use subsets of cues and trust unreliable informants more frequently (e.g., Krogh-Jespersen & Echols, 2012). Could developmental discontinuities in selective trust research be best explained by task demands or do children value different kinds of information over time?
This symposium explores the developmental trajectory of mechanisms underlying selective trust from 3 to 8 years. The first presenter will discuss the influence of epistemic states and speech pragmatics on 3-4-year-olds’ reliability judgments. The second presenter will compare the effects of epistemic states and social motives on selective trust in 3-4-year-olds. The third presenter will discuss the role of epistemic states versus social group membership from 3 to 5 years. Finally, the fourth presenter will talk about the role of informant calibration – the degree of correspondence between event statistics and informant’s certainty – on selective trust in 4-8-year-olds.
Following the talks, the presenters will discuss the timeline of different cues to selective trust as they become available to children. They will also speculate about potential shifts in children's reasoning that may underlie changes in selective trust between younger and older children.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Elena Luchkina, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• Accuracy statistics and inferences about speakers’ epistemic knowledge drive children’s reliability judgments in the verbal domain - Presenting Author: Elena Luchkina, Brown University; David M. Sobel, Brown University; James Morgan, Brown University

• Children Use of Mental State Information in Selective Trust Judgments - Presenting Author: Kimberly E. Vanderbilt, California State University San Marcos; Karlena Diane Ochoa, University of Oregon; California State University San Marcos; Gail D Heyman, University of California, San Diego; David Liu, The University of Oklahoma

• Age-related differences in children’s relative weighting of cues to informant reliability - Presenting Author: Kathleen Helen Corriveau, Boston University

• Children’s Use of Speaker Calibration: Developmental Trends and Individual Differences - Presenting Author: Sarah Suarez, University of Minnesota; Melissa Koenig, University of Minnesota