Do children interpret informants' confidence as person-specific or situational?

Children prefer to learn from confident rather than hesitant informants. However, it is unclear how children interpret confidence cues: these could be construed as strictly situational indicators of an informant's current certainty about the information they are conveying, or alternatively as person-specific indicators of how "knowledgeable" someone is across situations. In three studies, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 1: N = 51, Experiment 3: N = 41) and 2- and 3-year-olds (Experiment 2: N = 80) saw informants differing in confidence. Each informant's confidence cues either remained constant throughout the experiment, changed between the history and test phases, or were present during the history but not test phase. Results suggest that 4- and 5-year-olds primarily treat confidence cues as situational, whereas there is uncertainty around younger preschoolers' interpretation due to low performance.

Individual Differences in Children's Preference to Learn From a Confident Informant.

Past research has demonstrated that children can use an informant's confidence level to selectively choose from whom to learn. Yet, in any given study, not all children show a preference to learn from the most confident informant. Are individual differences in this preference stable over time and across learning situations? In two studies, we evaluated the stability of preschoolers' performance on selective learning tasks using confidence as a cue. The first study (N = 48) presented children with the same two informants, one confident and one hesitant, and the same four test trials twice with a 1-week delay between administrations. The second study (N = 50) presented two parallel tasks with different pairs of informants and test trials one after the other in the same testing session. Correlations between administrations were moderate in the first study and small in the second study, suggesting that children show some stability in their preference to learn from a confident individual but that their performance is also influenced by important situational factors, measurement error or both. Implications for the study of individual differences in selective social learning are discussed.