Teaching Without Thinking: Negative Evaluations of Rote Pedagogy.

When people make decisions, they act in a way that is either automatic ("rote"), or more thoughtful ("reflective"). But do people notice when others are behaving in a rote way, and do they care? We examine the detection of rote behavior and its consequences in U.S. adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and learning. We establish repetitiveness as a cue for rote behavior (Experiment 1), and find that rote people are seen as worse teachers (Experiment 2). We also find that the more a person's feedback seems similar across groups (indicating greater rote-ness), the more negatively their teaching is evaluated (Experiment 3). A word-embedding analysis of an open-response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Experiment 4). We also show that repetitiveness can be decoupled from perceptions of rote-ness given contextual explanation (Experiment 5). Finally, we establish two additional cues to rote behavior that can be tied to quality of teaching (Experiment 6). These results empirically show that people detect and care about scripted behaviors in pedagogy, and suggest an important extension to formal frameworks of social reasoning.

Early environments and exploration in the preschool years.

A great deal of research has demonstrated how children's exploration is driven by opportunities for learning. However, less work has investigated how individual differences across children and their environmental contexts relate to patterns in playful exploration. We performed a "mega-analysis" in which we pooled preschool-aged children's play data from four past experiments in our lab (N = 278; M(age) = 56 months) and correlated play behaviors with age and socioeconomic status (median income, modal education in children's home zip codes). We found that, with age, children performed more unique actions during play. Additionally, children from lower SES areas explored more variably; the link between this play and tendencies to focus on pedagogically demonstrated features traded off differently than it did for higher SES children. This work lays critical groundwork for understanding exploration across developmental contexts.

Children Use Teachers' Beliefs About Their Abilities to Calibrate Explore-Exploit Decisions.

Models of the explore-exploit problem have explained how children's decision making is weighed by a bias for information (directed exploration), randomness, and generalization. These behaviors are often tested in domains where a choice to explore (or exploit) is guaranteed to reveal an outcome. An often overlooked but critical component of the assessment of explore-exploit decisions lies in the expected success of taking actions in the first place-and, crucially, how such decisions might be carried out when learning from others. Here, we examine how children consider an informal teacher's beliefs about the child's competence when deciding how difficult a task they want to pursue. We present a simple model of this problem that predicts that while learners should follow the recommendation of an accurate teacher, they should exploit easier games when a teacher overestimates their abilities, and explore harder games when she underestimates them. We tested these predictions in two experiments with adults (Experiment 1) and 6- to 8-year-old children (Experiment 2). In our task, participants' performance on a picture-matching game was either overestimated, underestimated, or accurately represented by a confederate (the "Teacher"), who then presented three new matching games of varying assessed difficulty (too easy, too hard, just right) at varying potential reward (low, medium, high). In line with our model's predictions, we found that both adults and children calibrated their choices to the teacher's representation of their competence. That is, to maximize expected reward, when she underestimated them, participants chose games the teacher evaluated as being too hard for them; when she overestimated them, they chose games she evaluated as being too easy; and when she was accurate, they chose games she assessed as being just right. This work provides insight into the early-emerging ability to calibrate explore-exploit decisions to others' knowledge when learning in informal pedagogical contexts.

The effects of information utility and teachers' knowledge on evaluations of under-informative pedagogy across development.

Teaching is a powerful way to transmit knowledge, but with this power comes a hazard: When teachers fail to select the best set of evidence for the learner, learners can be misled to draw inaccurate inferences. Evaluating others' failures as teachers, however, is a nontrivial problem; people may fail to be informative for different reasons, and not all failures are equally blameworthy. How do learners evaluate the quality of teachers, and what factors influence such evaluations? Here, we present a Bayesian model of teacher evaluation that considers the utility of a teacher's pedagogical sampling given their prior knowledge. In Experiment 1 (N=1168), we test the model predictions against adults' evaluations of a teacher who demonstrated all or a subset of the functions on a novel device. Consistent with the model predictions, participants' ratings integrated information about the number of functions taught, their values, as well as how much the teacher knew. Using a modified paradigm for children, Experiments 2 (N=48) and 3 (N=40) found that preschool-aged children (2a, 3) and adults (2b) make nuanced judgments of teacher quality that are well predicted by the model. However, after an unsuccessful attempt to replicate the results with preschoolers (Experiment 4, N=24), in Experiment 5 (N=24) we further investigate the development of teacher evaluation in a sample of seven- and eight-year-olds. These older children successfully distinguished teachers based on the amount and value of what was demonstrated, and their ability to evaluate omissions relative to the teacher's knowledge state was related to their tendency to spontaneously reference the teacher's knowledge when explaining their evaluations. In sum, our work illustrates how the human ability to learn from others supports not just learning about the world but also learning about the teachers themselves. By reasoning about others' informativeness, learners can evaluate others' teaching and make better learning decisions.

Organizing the Methodological Toolbox: Lessons Learned From Implementing Developmental Methods Online.

Adapting studies typically run in the lab, preschool, or museum to online data collection presents a variety of challenges. The solutions to those challenges depend heavily on the specific questions pursued, the methods used, and the constraints imposed by available technology. We present a partial sample of solutions, discussing approaches we have developed for adapting studies targeting a range of different developmental populations, from infants to school-aged children, and utilizing various online methods such as high-framerate video presentation, having participants interact with a display on their own computer, having the experimenter interact with both the participant and an actor, recording free-play with physical objects, recording infant looking times both offline and live, and more. We also raise issues and solutions regarding recruitment and representativeness in online samples. By identifying the concrete needs of a given approach, tools that meet each of those individual needs, and interfaces between those tools, we have been able to implement many (but not all) of our studies using online data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic. This systematic review aligning available tools and approaches with different methods can inform the design of future studies, in and outside of the lab.

Partial mental simulation explains fallacies in physical reasoning.

People can reason intuitively, efficiently, and accurately about everyday physical events. Recent accounts suggest that people use mental simulation to make such intuitive physical judgments. But mental simulation models are computationally expensive; how is physical reasoning relatively accurate, while maintaining computational tractability? We suggest that people make use of partial simulation, mentally moving forward in time only parts of the world deemed relevant. We propose a novel partial simulation model, and test it on the physical conjunction fallacy, a recently observed phenomenon [Ludwin-Peery et al. (2020). Broken physics: A conjunction-fallacy effect in intuitive physical reasoning. Psychological Science, 31(12), 1602-1611. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620957610] that poses a challenge for full simulation models. We find an excellent fit between our model's predictions and human performance on a set of scenarios that build on and extend those used by Ludwin-Peery et al. [(2020). Broken physics: A conjunction-fallacy effect in intuitive physical reasoning. Psychological Science, 31(12), 1602-1611. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620957610], quantitatively and qualitatively accounting for deviations from optimal performance. Our results suggest more generally how we allocate cognitive resources to efficiently represent and simulate physical scenes.

Opportunities and challenges integrating resource-rational analysis with developmental perspectives.

Lieder and Griffiths present the computational framework "resource-rational analysis" to address the reverse-engineering problem in cognition. Here we discuss how developmental psychology affords a unique and critical opportunity to employ this framework, but which is overlooked in this piece. We describe how developmental change provides an avenue for ongoing work as well as inspiration for expansion of the resource-rational approach.

Children's developing theory of mind and pedagogical evidence selection.

Natural pedagogy emerges early in development, but good teaching requires tailoring evidence to learners' knowledge. How does the ability to reason about others' minds support early pedagogical evidence selection abilities? In 3 experiments (N = 205), we investigated preschool-aged children's ability to consider others' knowledge when selecting evidence in the service of teaching. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that 4-year-olds reliably selected evidence to rectify others' false beliefs, and provided causal explanations in their teaching, whereas 3-year-olds did not. In Experiment 2, we tie children's evidence selection abilities to theory of mind (ToM) development, above and beyond effects of age and numerical conservation abilities. In Experiment 3, we employed a 6-week training of children's pedagogical evidence selection with a new teaching task, and further explored the relationship between these skills and children's ToM abilities. We qualitatively replicated our results from Experiment 2 and report tentative evidence for a link between the pedagogical training and improvements in ToM. Together, our findings suggest important connections between reasoning about others' minds and evidential reasoning in natural pedagogy during early childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Partition dependence in consumer choice: Perceptual groupings do not reliably shape decisions.

The partitioning of options into arbitrary categories has been shown to influence decisions about allocating choices or resources among those options; this phenomenon is called partition dependence. While we do not call into question the validity of the partition dependence phenomenon in the present work, we do examine the robustness of one of the experimental paradigms reported by Fox, Ratner, and Lieb (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 538-551, 2005, Study 4). In three experiments (N = 300) conducted here, participants chose from a menu of perceptually partitioned options (varieties of candy distributed across bowls). We found no clear evidence of partition dependent choice in children (Experiment 1) and no evidence at all of partition dependence in adults' choices (Experiments 1-3). This was true even when methods were closely matched to those of Fox et al.'s Study 4 (Experiment 3). We conclude that the candy-bowl choice task does not reliably elicit partition dependence and propose possible explanations for the discrepancy between these findings and prior reports. Future work will explore the conditions under which partition dependence in consumer choice does reliably arise.