When is it appropriate to ask a question? The role of age, social context, and personality

How do children decide when it is appropriate to ask a question? In Study 1 (preregistered), 50 4- and 5-year-olds, 50 7- and 8-year-olds, and 100 adults watched vignettes featuring a child who had a question, and participants indicated whether they thought the child should ask the question "right now." Both adults and children endorsed more question-asking to a well-known informant than to an acquaintance and to someone doing nothing than to someone busy working or busy socializing. However, younger children endorsed asking questions to someone who was busy more often than older children and adults. In addition, Big Five personality traits predicted endorsement of question-asking. In Study 2 (preregistered, N = 500), mothers' self-reports showed that children's actual question-asking varied with age, informant activity, and informant familiarity in ways that paralleled the results of Study 1. In Study 3 (N = 100), we examined mothers' responses to their children's question-asking and found that mothers' responses to their children's question-asking varied based on the mother's activity. In addition, mothers high in authoritarianism were less likely to answer their children's questions when they were busy than mothers low in authoritarianism. In sum, across three studies, we found evidence that the age-related decline in children's question-asking to their parents reflects a change in children's reasoning about when it is appropriate to ask a question.

Disentangling genetic and environmental influences on early language development: The interplay of genetic propensity for negative emotionality and surgency, and parenting behavior effects on early language skills in an adoption study

Parenting and children's temperament are important influences on language development. However, temperament may reflect prior parenting, and parenting effects may reflect genes common to parents and children. In 561 U.S. adoptees (57% male) and their birth and rearing parents (70% and 92% White, 13% and 4% African American, and 7% and 2% Latinx, respectively), this study demonstrated how genetic propensity for temperament affects language development, and how this relates to parenting. Genetic propensity for negative emotionality inversely predicted language at 27 months (β = -.15) and evoked greater maternal warmth (β = .12), whereas propensity for surgency positively predicted language at 4.5 years (β = .20), especially when warmth was low. Parental warmth (β = .15) and sensitivity (β = .19) further contributed to language development, controlling for common gene effects.

When the internet is wrong: Children's trust in an inaccurate internet or human source

Prior studies have shown that children can select and evaluate information based on the previous accuracy of an informant. The current study examines how 5- to 6-year-old kindergarteners (N = 46) and 7- to 8-year-old second-graders (N = 48) in China judge scientific information provided by the internet or a teacher, and how a source's history of inaccuracy influences participants' judgments. When lacking explicit information about previous accuracy, neither younger children nor older children showed differential trust in the internet or a teacher. After observing the internet providing inaccurate information, children in both age groups decreased their trust in statements from the internet. When the teacher was consistently inaccurate, children in both age groups also showed reduced preference for the teacher's statements. These findings demonstrate that 5- to 8-year-old children take into account history of inaccuracy when deciding whether to request or endorse information from the internet or a teacher.

Social cognition and trust: Exploring the role of theory of mind and hostile attribution bias in children's skepticism of inaccurate informants

A growing body of research has examined the role of individual differences in children's selective trust. The current study was designed to explore how individual differences in theory of mind and hostile attribution bias affect children's trust. Four- and five-year-old children took part in a standard selective trust paradigm in which they had the choice between a previously inaccurate informant and an unfamiliar informant. They were also asked to interpret why the previously inaccurate informant had provided incorrect information in the past. Finally, children completed a hostile attribution bias task and a theory of mind task. Children with better theory of mind ability were more likely to defer to the unfamiliar informant on the selective trust task. Children with greater hostile attribution bias were more likely to interpret previous inaccuracy as a result of "being tricky" rather than having "made a mistake." However, these interpretations did not influence children's choices on the selective trust task. Therefore, although there is reason to believe that establishing selective trust involves both cognitive and social processes, the current study raises questions about the nature of this relationship and how children draw on different sociocognitive skills when establishing epistemic trust.

Personality predicts innovation and social learning in children: Implications for cultural evolution

Innovation and social learning are the pillars of cultural evolution, allowing cultural behaviours to cumulatively advance over generations. Yet, little is known about individual differences in the use of social and asocial information. We examined whether personality influenced 7-11-year-old children's (N = 282) propensity to elect to observe others first or independently generate solutions to novel problems. Conscientiousness was associated with electing for no demonstrations, while agreeableness was associated with opting for demonstrations. For children receiving demonstrations, openness to experience consistently predicted deviation from observed methods. Children who opted for no demonstrations were also more likely than those opting for demonstrations to exhibit tool manufacture on an innovation challenge and displayed higher creativity, as measured by an alternate uses task. These results highlight how new cultural traditions emerge, establish and advance by identifying which individuals generate new cultural variants in populations and which are influential in the diffusion of these variants, and help reduce the apparent tension within the 'ratchet' of cumulative culture.

Specifying links between infants' theory of mind, associative learning, and selective trust

The psychological mechanisms underlying infants' selective social learning are currently a subject of controversy. The main goal of the present study was to contribute data to this debate by investigating whether domain-specific or domain-general abilities guide infants' selectivity. Eighteen-month-olds observed a reliable and an unreliable speaker, and then completed a forced-choice word learning paradigm, two theory of mind tasks, and an associative learning task. Results revealed that infants showed sensitivity to the verbal competence of the speaker. Additionally, infants with superior knowledge inference abilities were less likely to learn from the unreliable speaker. No link was observed between selective social learning and associative learning skills. These results replicate and extend previous findings demonstrating that socio-cognitive abilities are linked to infants' selective social learning.

How Children Learn From Others: An Analysis of Selective Word Learning

One way children are remarkable learners is that they learn from others. Critically, children are selective when assessing from whom to learn, particularly in the domain of word learning. We conducted an analysis of children's selective word learning, reviewing 63 papers on 6,525 participants. Children's ability to engage in selective word learning appeared to be present in the youngest samples surveyed. Their more metacognitive understanding that epistemic competence indicates reliability or that others are good sources of knowledge has more of a developmental trajectory. We also found that various methodological factors used to assess children influence performance. We conclude with a synthesis of theoretical accounts of how children learn from others.

Infants' Ability to Detect Emotional Incongruency: Deep or Shallow?

Infants can detect individuals who demonstrate emotions that are incongruent with an event and are less likely to trust them. However, the nature of the mechanisms underlying this selectivity is currently subject to controversy. The objective of this study was to examine whether infants' socio-cognitive and associative learning skills are linked to their selective trust. A total of 102 14-month-olds were exposed to a person who demonstrated congruent or incongruent emotional referencing (e.g., happy when looking inside an empty box), and were tested on their willingness to follow the emoter's gaze. Knowledge inference and associative learning tasks were also administered. It was hypothesized that infants would be less likely to trust the incongruent emoter and that this selectivity would be related to their associative learning skills, and not their socio-cognitive skills. The results revealed that infants were not only able to detect the incongruent emoter, but were subsequently less likely to follow her gaze toward an object invisible to them. More importantly, infants who demonstrated superior performance on the knowledge inference task, but not the associative learning task, were better able to detect the person's emotional incongruency. These findings provide additional support for the rich interpretation of infants' selective trust.

Learning Who Knows What: Children Adjust Their Inquiry to Gather Information from Others

The current research focuses on how children’s inquiry may be affected by how they learn about which sources are likely to provide accurate, helpful information. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) were tasked with asking two different puppet informants – one knowledgeable and one not knowledgeable – questions to determine which of four pictures was inside of a set of boxes. Before beginning the task, children learned about the knowledge status of the two informants in one of three learning conditions: (a) by witnessing how the informants answered sample questions (i.e., show condition), (b) by being told what informants knew (i.e., tell condition), or (c) by both (i.e., show & tell condition). Five-year-olds outperformed 4-year-olds on most parts of the inquiry process. Overall, children were less certain about which informant had been most helpful when they found out that information solely via observation as compared to when they had some third-party information about the informant knowledge. However, children adjusted their questioning strategies appropriately, more frequently asking questions that served to double check the answers they were receiving in the observation only condition. In sum, children were highly resilient, adjusting their questioning strategies based on the information provided, leading to no overall differences in their accuracy of determining the contents of the boxes between the three learning conditions. Implications for learning from others are discussed.