Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification

Learning Loopholes: The Development of Intentional Misunderstandings in Children

What do children do when they do not want to obey but cannot afford to disobey? Might they, like adults, feign misunderstanding and seek out loopholes? Across four studies (N = 723; 44% female; USA; majority White; data collected 2020-2023), we find that loophole behavior emerges around ages 5 to 6 (Study 1, 3-18 years), that children think loopholes will get them into less trouble than non-compliance (Study 2, 4-10 years), predict that other children will be more likely to exploit loopholes when goals conflict (Study 3, 5-10 years), and are increasingly able to generate loopholes themselves (Study 4, 5-10 years). This work provides new insights on how children navigate the gray area between compliance and defiance and the development of loophole behavior across early and middle childhood.

Young Children's Understanding of Helping as Increasing Another Agent's Utility

Instrumental helping is one of the paradigmatic "prosocial" behaviors featured in developmental research on sociomoral reasoning, but not much is known about how children recognize instances of helping behaviors or understand the term 'help'. Here, we examined whether young children represent helping as a second-order goal and take it to mean increasing the utility of another agent. In Study 1, we tested whether 12-month-old infants would expect an agent who previously helped to perform an action that reduced the Helpee's action cost. We found that while infants expected agents to act individually efficiently (Experiment 1C), they did not expect the agent to choose the action that maximally reduced the Helpee's cost compared to an action that reduced the cost less (Experiment 1A) or not at all (Experiment 1B). In Study 2, we examined whether three-year-old preschoolers (1) maximize a Helpee's cost reduction when prompted to help in a first-person task, and (2) identify in a third-party context which of two agents, performing superficially similar behaviors with varying effects on the Helpee's action options, actually helped. Contrary to our predictions, preschoolers did not help in a way that maximally reduced the Helpee's cost in (1). In (2), however, they indicated that the agent who reduced the Helpee's action cost was the one who helped. Taken together, these results support the proposal that, at least by preschool age, children possess a second-order utility-based concept of helping, but that they may not exhibit efficiency when choosing their own helping actions.

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmental model according to which children consider information sources in an age-specific way and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-5-year-old children's word learning across a range of experimental conditions in which they had to integrate three information sources. Model comparison suggests that the central locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources, rather than changes in integration ability. This work presents a developmental theory of information integration during language learning and illustrates how formal models can be used to make a quantitative test of the predictive and explanatory power of competing theories.

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Preschoolers Expect Agents to Weigh Information Gain and Information Cost When Deciding Whether to Explore

When deciding whether to explore, agents must consider both their need for information and its cost. Do children recognize that exploration reflects a trade-off between action costs and expected information gain, inferring epistemic states accordingly? In two experiments, 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 144; of diverse race and ethnicity) judge that an agent who refuses to obtain low-cost information must have already known it, and an agent who incurs a greater cost to gain information must have a greater epistemic desire. Two control studies suggest that these findings cannot be explained by low-level associations between competence and knowledge. Our results suggest that preschoolers' theory of mind includes expectations about how costs interact with epistemic desires and states to produce exploratory action.

The Unintended Consequences of the Things We Say: What Generic Statements Communicate to Children About Unmentioned Categories

Adults frequently use generic language (e.g., "Boys play sports") to communicate information about social groups to children. Whereas previous research speaks to how children often interpret information about the groups described by generic statements, less is known about what generic claims may implicitly communicate about unmentioned groups (e.g., the possibility that "Boys play sports" implies that girls do not). Study 1 (287 four- to six-year-olds, 56 adults) and Study 2 (84 four- to six-year-olds) found that children as young as 4.5 years draw inferences about unmentioned categories from generic claims (but not matched specific statements)-and that the tendency to make these inferences strengthens with age. Study 3 (181 four- to seven-year-olds, 65 adults) provides evidence that pragmatic reasoning serves as a mechanism underlying these inferences. We conclude by discussing the role that generic language may play in inadvertently communicating social stereotypes to young children.

Iconic realism or representational blindness? How young children and adults reason about pictures and objects

When reasoning about a representation (e.g., a toy lion), children often engage in "iconic realism," whereby representations are reported to have properties of their real-life referents. The present studies examined an inverse difficulty that we dub "representational blindness": overlooking (i.e., being 'blind' to) a representation's objective, non-symbolic features. In three experiments (N = 302), children (3-6 years) and adults saw a series of representations (pictures and toys) and were tested on how often they endorsed a property that was true of the real-world referent (e.g., reporting that a toy lion is dangerous; iconic realism) or rejected a property that was true of the representation (e.g., denying that a toy elephant can be lifted with one hand; representational blindness). We found that representational blindness and realism were separable tendencies. Children (and to a lesser extent, adults) displayed both, but at different rates for pictures than for toys. We conclude that children's reasoning about representations includes a bias to overlook the features of the representation itself. Further, although pictures and toys are both representations, they provoke ontologically distinct interpretations. We discuss the implications of these results for a variety of important conceptual tasks, including learning to read, draw, or objectively evaluate scientific evidence.