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

Children weigh internet inaccuracy when trusting in online information

This study examined whether an internet source's history of inaccuracy influences children's epistemic trust in online information. Chinese children aged 4 to 8 years (N = 84; 41 girls and 43 boys) accessed information on their own from an image-based website, heard information from the internet that was relayed by an adult, or viewed a person in a video providing information without referring to the internet (in a baseline condition). After the internet source provided three obviously inaccurate statements, children significantly reduced their epistemic trust in the internet source regardless of whether they obtained the information through a direct interaction with the internet or it was relayed by an adult. Moreover, the extent of the reduction in trust was comparable to the baseline video condition. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that 4- to 8-year-old children take into account a history of inaccuracy and revise their beliefs in statements from the internet, just as they do when evaluating human informants.

The development of social learning: from pedagogical cues to selective learning

Learning new information from others, called social learning, is one of the most fundamental types of learning from infancy. Developmental studies show that infants likely engage in social learning situations selectively and that social learning facilitates infant information processing. In this paper, we summarize how social learning functions support human learning from infancy focusing on two aspects of social learning; pedagogical learning and selective learning. We also provide an overview of the developmental process of social learning based on the findings of developmental research. This review suggests that the learning facilitation effects of pedagogical learning decrease with development, while the facilitation effects of selective learning are observed even in older ages. The differences in these learning facilitation effects are considered to be due to the differences in the utility of learning in uncertain environments. The findings of the studies imply the unique nature of human social learning and the critical role of social interactions in cognitive development. Understanding the development of social learning provides valuable insights into how infants learn and adapt in complex social environments.

How does Google get its information?: Children's judgements about Google search

Children frequently use Google to answer their questions, yet what they think about Google's capacity and limitations is unclear. This study explores children's beliefs about Google's capacity to answer questions. American children ages 9 and 10 (n = 44; 18 boys and 26 girls) viewed factual questions directed towards Google or a person. After viewing each question, they reported their confidence in the informant's accuracy, the time it would take the informant to obtain the answer and how the informant would obtain the answer. Finally, they generated questions that the internet would be capable or incapable of answering. Children believed Google would be more accurate and faster than a person at answering questions. Children consistently generated appropriate questions that the internet would be good at answering, but they sometimes struggled to generate questions that the internet would not be good at answering. Implications for children's learning are discussed.

Children's anthropomorphism of inanimate agents

This review article examines the extant literature on animism and anthropomorphism in infants and young children. A substantial body of work indicates that both infants and young children have a broad concept of what constitutes a sentient agent and react to inanimate objects as they do to people in the same context. The literature has also revealed a developmental pattern in which anthropomorphism decreases with age, but social robots appear to be an exception to this pattern. Additionally, the review shows that children attribute psychological properties to social robots less so than people but still anthropomorphize them. Importantly, some research suggests that anthropomorphism of social robots is dependent upon their morphology and human-like behaviors. The extent to which children anthropomorphize robots is dependent on their exposure to them and the presence of human-like features. Based on the existing literature, we conclude that in infancy, a large range of inanimate objects (e.g., boxes, geometric figures) that display animate motion patterns trigger the same behaviors observed in child-adult interactions, suggesting some implicit form of anthropomorphism. The review concludes that additional research is needed to understand what infants and children judge as social agents and how the perception of inanimate agents changes over the lifespan. As exposure to robots and virtual assistants increases, future research must focus on better understanding the full impact that regular interactions with such partners will have on children's anthropomorphizing. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Learning Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Computer Science and Robotics > Robotics.

The Collaborative Nature of Testimonial Learning

Children's testimonial learning often occurs in epistemic collaborations with others. In this paper, we will discuss ways in which cultural learning emerges in social and interpersonal contexts, and is intrinsically supported and guided by children's collaborative capacities. Much work in cultural learning has focused on children's examination of speaker and model characteristics, but more recent research has investigated the interactive aspects of testimonial exchanges. We will review evidence that children (1) participate in the interpersonal commitments that are shared in testimonial transactions by way of direct address and epistemic buck passing, (2) participate in social groups that affect their selective learning in nuanced ways, and (3) may detect epistemic harms by listeners who refuse to believe sincere and accurate speakers. Implications for conceptualizing children's testimonial learning as an interactive mechanism of collaboration will be discussed.

The effects of overhearing on vocabulary learning in ethnic majority and minority preschool children

Research shows that infants and preschoolers can learn novel words equally well through addressed speech as through overhearing two adults. However, most of this research draws from samples of ethnic majority children. The current study compares word learning in preschoolers (M age = 5;6) with an ethnic minority and an ethnic majority background (N = 132). An experimenter of the majority group (representative for most teachers in Flemish education) told a story in three different interaction situations: Addressed Speech, Overhearing Classroom and Overhearing Two Adults. Results show that children of both ethnic groups learn novel words in Addressed Speech and in Overhearing Classroom equally well. However, minority children learned significantly fewer words in Overhearing Two Adults. This study suggests important differences in how ethnic majority and minority children learn through indirect speech in educational (monolingual) settings. In addition, the study scrutinizes the potential role of social identification in overhearing mechanisms.

The Icing on the Cake. Or Is it Frosting? The Influence of Group Membership on Children's Lexical Choices

Adults are skilled at using language to construct/negotiate identity and to signal affiliation with others, but little is known about how these abilities develop in children. Clearly, children mirror statistical patterns in their local environment (e.g., Canadian children using zed instead of zee), but do they flexibly adapt their linguistic choices on the fly in response to the choices of different peers? To address this question, we examined the effect of group membership on 7- to 9-year-olds' labeling of objects in a trivia game, exploring whether they were more likely to use a particular label (e.g., sofa vs. couch) if members of their "team" also used that label. In a preregistered study, children (N = 72) were assigned to a team (red or green) and were asked during experimental trials to answer questions-which had multiple possible answers (e.g., blackboard or chalkboard)-after hearing two teammates and two opponents respond to the same question. Results showed that children were significantly more likely to produce labels less commonly used by the community (i.e., dispreferred labels) when their teammates had produced those labels. Crucially, this effect was tied to group membership, and could not be explained by children simply repeating the most recently used label. These findings demonstrate how social processes (i.e., group membership) can guide linguistic variation in children.

Children's susceptibility to online misinformation

Children have a reputation for credulity that is undeserved; even preschoolers have proven adept at identifying implausible claims and unreliable informants. Still, the strategies children use to identify and reject dubious information are often superficial, which leaves them vulnerable to accepting such information if conveyed through seemingly authoritative channels or formatted in seemingly authentic ways. Indeed, children of all ages have difficulty differentiating legitimate websites and news stories from illegitimate ones, as they are misled by the inclusion of outwardly professional features such as graphs, statistics, and journalistic layout. Children may not be inherently credulous, but their skepticism toward dubious information is often shallow enough to be overridden by the deceptive trappings of online misinformation.

Do preschoolers trust a competent robot pointer?

How young children learn from different informants has been widely studied. However, most studies investigate how children learn verbally conveyed information. Furthermore, most studies investigate how children learn from humans. This study sought to investigate how 3-year-old children learn from, and come to trust, a competent robot versus an incompetent human when competency is established using a pointing paradigm. During an induction phase, a robot informant pointed at a toy inside a transparent box, whereas a human pointed at an empty box. During the test phase, both agents pointed at opaque boxes. We found that young children asked the robot for help to locate a hidden toy more than the human (ask questions) and correctly identified the robot to be accurate (judgment questions). However, children equally endorsed the locations pointed at by both the robot and the human (endorse questions). This suggests that 3-year-olds are sensitive to the epistemic characteristics of the informant even when its displayed social properties are minimal.

Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers' Processing of Novel Communicative Cues

Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative cues tend to have low processing costs and high cognitive benefits. We tested this hypothesis in three studies in which toddlers (N = 90) searched for a reward hidden in one of several containers. In all studies, an adult communicated the reward's location with an unfamiliar and ambiguous cue. We manipulated the processing costs (operationalized as inferential chain length) and cognitive benefits (operationalized as informativeness) of the possible interpretations of the cues. Toddlers processing of novel communicative cues were guided by expectations of low processing costs (Study 1) and high cognitive benefits (Studies 2 and 3). More specifically, toddlers treated novel cues as if they were easy to process, informative, and accurate, even when provided with repeated evidence to the contrary. These results indicate that, from toddlerhood onward, expectations of cognitive utility shape the processing of novel communicative cues. These data also reveal that toddlers, who are in the process of learning the language and communicative conventions of people around them, exert a pressure favoring cognitive efficiency in communicative systems.

Do I know what they know? Linking metacognition, theory of mind, and selective social learning

Young children are often dependent on learning from others and to this effect develop heuristics to help distinguish reliable sources from unreliable sources. Where younger children rely heavily on social cues such as familiarity with a source to make this distinction, older children tend to rely more on an informant's competence. Little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that help children to select the best informant; however, some evidence points toward mechanisms such as metacognition (thinking about thinking) and theory of mind (thinking about other's thoughts) being involved. The goals of the current study were to (a) explore how the monitoring and control components of metacognition may predict selective social learning in preschoolers and (b) attempt to replicate a reported link between selective social learning and theory of mind. In Experiment 1, no relationship was observed across the measures. In Experiment 2, only selective social learning and belief reasoning were found to be related as well as when both experiments' samples were combined. No links between selective social learning and metacognition were observed in the two experiments. These results suggest that theory of mind is a stronger correlate of selective learning than metacognition in young children. The implications regarding the kind of tasks used to measure metacognition are discussed.

Children Treat Grammatical Errors Differently for Native and Non-Native Speakers

Both children and adults demonstrate biases against non-native speakers. However, in some situations, adults act more generously towards non-native speakers than towards native speakers. In particular, adults judge errors from non-native speakers less harshly, presumably because they expect such errors. In the present study, we asked whether 5-6-year-old children place less weight on errors from speakers with a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 80) listened to pairs of either native or foreign-accented speakers (between-subjects) label objects. For native speaker pairings, children preferred information provided by grammatical speakers over information from speakers who made subject-verb agreement errors. In contrast, children chose between foreign-accented speakers at chance. In Experiment 2 (N = 40), children preferred information from grammatical foreign-accented speakers over information from foreign-accented speakers who produced word-order violations. These findings constitute the first demonstration that children treat speech errors differently based on a speaker’s language background.

Children transition from simple associations to explicitly reasoned social learning strategies between age four and eight

To differentiate the use of simple associations from use of explicitly reasoned selective social learning, we can look for age-related changes in children’s behaviour that might signify a switch from one social learning strategy to the other. We presented 4- to 8-year-old children visiting a zoo in Scotland (N = 109) with a task in which the perceptual access of two informants was determined by the differing opacity of two screens of similar visual appearance during a hiding event. Initially success could be achieved by forming an association or inferring a rule based on salient visual (but causally irrelevant) cues. However, following a switch in the scenario, success required explicit reasoning about informants’ potential to provide valuable information based on their perceptual access. Following the switch, older children were more likely to select a knowledgeable informant. This suggests that some younger children who succeeded in the pre-switch trials had inferred rules or formed associations based on superficial, yet salient, visual cues, whereas older children made the link between perceptual access and the potential to inform. This late development and apparent cognitive challenge are consistent with proposals that such capacities are linked to the distinctiveness of human cumulative culture.

The origins of trust: Humans' reliance on communicative cues supersedes firsthand experience during the second year of life

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred-like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal search paradigm in four main studies and three supplementary studies (N = 208). Infants and toddlers first see where a reward is, and then an informant communicates to them that it is in another location. We use this general experimental set-up to assess the role of age, informants' knowledge, cue's familiarity, and communicative context on trust in communicated information. Results reveal that infants and toddlers quickly trust familiar and novel communicative cues from well-informed adults. When searching for the reward, they follow a well-informed adults' communicative cue, even when it contradicts what they just saw. Furthermore, infants are less likely to be guided by familiar and novel cues from poorly informed adults than toddlers. Thus, reliance on communication is calibrated during early childhood, up to the point of overriding evidence about informants' knowledge. Moreover, toddlers trust much more strongly a novel cue when it is used in a communicative manner. Toddlers' trust cannot be explained by mere compliance: it is highly reduced when communicated information is pitted against what participants currently see. Thus, humans' strong tendency to rely on familiar and novel communicative cues emerges in infancy, and intensifies during the second year of life. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The roles of group membership and social exclusion in children's testimonial learning

Here, we used high- and low-stakes testimonial learning tasks to better understand two important types of social influence on children's learning decisions: group membership and social ostracism. Children (4- and 5-year-olds; N = 100) were either included or excluded by in-group or outgroup members in an online ball tossing game. Then, children were asked to selectively learn new information from either an in-group or out-group member. They also received counterintuitive information from an in-group or out-group member that was in conflict with their own intuitions. When learning new information, children who were excluded were more likely to selectively trust information from their in-group member. In contrast, when accepting counterintuitive information, children relied only on group membership regardless of their exclusion status. Together, these findings demonstrate ways in which different forms of testimonial learning are guided not only by epistemic motivations but also by social motivations of affiliation and maintaining relationships with others.

Unsafe to eat? How familiar cartoon characters affect children's learning about potentially harmful foods

Young children learn about the properties of foods, such as taste and healthiness, from others. By using selective trust tasks in which a familiar cartoon character and an unfamiliar informant provided different testimony about food safety, this study examined how an informant's familiarity affected 4- to 6-year-old children's selective social learning about food safety. In Experiment 1, when judging the safety of foods from the familiar cartoon character and the unfamiliar character, children across all age groups showed a preference for asking the familiar character for information. For endorse questions, 4- and 5-year-olds did not consistently accept or reject either character's statements, while 6-year-olds endorsed the unfamiliar cartoon character's statements more often than the familiar character's statements. In Experiment 2, when the unfamiliar informant was a real adult instead of a fictional cartoon character, children sought out information from the familiar character more often than from the adult, and they did not differentially endorse statements by either informant. Moreover, children who had less advanced theory of mind skills and who viewed cartoon characters as more real were more likely to ask the cartoon character. These results suggest that although children prefer to obtain information from familiar characters, they accept information about food safety from multiple kinds of sources and their social-cognitive skills play a role in their decisions.

There's more to consider than knowledge and belief

Phillips et al. present a number of arguments for the premise that knowledge is more basic than belief. Although their arguments are coherent and sound, they do not directly address numerous cases in which belief appears to be a developmental precursor to knowledge. I describe several examples, not necessarily as a direct challenge, but rather to better understand their framework.

Children's developing capacity to calibrate the verbal testimony of others with observed evidence when inferring causal relations

Across two studies (N = 120), we investigated the development of children's ability to calibrate the certainty of verbal testimony with observable data that varied in the degree of predictive causal accuracy. In Study 1, 4- and 5-year-olds heard a certain explanation or an uncertain explanation about deterministic causal relations. The 5-year-olds made more accurate causal inferences when the informant provided a certain and more calibrated explanation. In Study 2, children heard similar explanations about probabilistic relations, making the uncertain informant more calibrated. The 5-year-olds were more likely to infer the correct causal relations when the informant was uncertain, but only when the explanation was attuned to the stochasticity of the individual causal events (or outcomes that sometimes occur). These findings imply that the capacity to integrate, and make efficient inferences, from distinct sources of knowledge emerges during the preschool years.