Poster #91 - Early reasoning about agents’ competence versus performance

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

For social animals like us, attending to what others can do and how they do it is important for guiding our learning. For example, infants and young children prefer to learn from and imitate people who are knowledgeable or competent, compared to those who are less adept (Stenberg, 2013; Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001; Buttelmann & Zmyj, 2020). However, adults know that performance doesn’t always reflect competence-- sometimes situational factors can cause a person to complete a task more poorly than they otherwise could have. Accurately evaluating others’ abilities thus requires considering multiple factors: both long-term characteristics that can influence their competence, as well as temporary constraints that can impact shorter-term performance. When in development can children consider factors that contribute to people’s competence versus performance?

In Experiment 1 we asked whether 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 51) can reason about the competence of social agents based on long-term traits. Children were asked to predict who would be better at a task such as drawing pictures or building towers: an adult or a child (age condition), or a human or a non-human animal (species condition). Children were sensitive to both of these traits, predicting that an adult would execute the tasks more successfully than a child (p < .001), and that a human would execute them more successfully than an animal (p < .001).

In Experiments 2 and 3, we assessed children’s reasoning about how performance is affected by temporary constraints. Preschoolers (N = 88) watched live-action videos (Expt. 2) or computer animations (Expt. 3) depicting two age- and gender-matched people engaging in a task (like building block towers). On each trial, one person was subject to a temporary constraint whereas the other person was free to engage in the task normally, and children were asked to predict who would produce the better outcome. Across both experiments, 4-year-olds successfully predicted that people would perform worse if physically constrained from touching the objects (ps < .001), if their range of hand motion was restricted (ps < .026), if their visual access was blocked (p = .081 in Expt. 2, p < .001 in Expt. 3), if their attention was diverted by a phone conversation (ps < .026), or if they were a face mask (Expt. 3 only, p = .002). Three-year-olds also understood that physical access to the task materials would affect people’s performance (ps < .001), but their understanding of motion range and visual access was more mixed. Three-year-olds failed to predict that attentional diversion would affect performance in both experiments (ps > .425), and they did not predict that wearing a face mask would affect people’s performance (p = .537).

These experiments show that children as young as three years old understand that long-term traits such as age and species can influence agents’ competence. In addition, children understand that more temporary constraints can impact task performance, although children’s ability to reason about specific constraints appears to improve with development. Thus, young children consider multiple factors when reasoning about agents’ competence and performance.

Authors

• Qiong Cao, Johns Hopkins University
  Presenting Author

• Lisa Feigenson, Johns Hopkins University