Children consider informants' explanation quality with their social dominance in seeking novel explanations.

Identifying high-quality causal explanations is key to scientific understanding. This research (N = 202; 50% girls; Mage: 5.82 years; 64% Asian, 33% White, and 3% multiracial; data collected from 2018 to 2024) examined how explanation circularity and informants' social dominance impact children's learning preferences for causal explanations. Raised in a culture valuing circular logic, Chinese children still preferred non-circular explanations and learning from informants providing non-circular explanations (d ≥ 0.50). When informants with non-circular explanations were subordinate to those with circular explanations, Chinese and American children preferred non-circular over circular explanations (d = 1.10), but did not prefer learning new information from either informant. Although children weigh explanation quality over informant dominance when seeking explanations for given questions, they consider both cues when evaluating informants' credibility.

Religious polarization and justification of belief in invisible scientific versus religious entities.

Children and adults express greater confidence in the existence of invisible scientific as compared to invisible religious entities. To further examine this differential confidence, 5- to 11-year-old Turkish children and their parents (N = 174, 122 females) from various regions in Türkiye, a country with an ongoing tension between secularism and religion, were tested in 2021 for their belief in invisible entities. Participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific than religious entities. For scientific entities, children justified their belief primarily by elaborating on the properties of the entity, rather than referring to the testimonial source of their judgment. This pattern was reversed for religious entities, arguably, highlighting the role of polarization in shaping the testimony children typically hear.

How does caregiver-child conversation during a scientific storybook reading impact children's mindset beliefs and persistence?

This study explores how caregiver-child scientific conversation during storybook reading focusing on the challenges or achievements of famous female scientists impacts preschoolers' mindset, beliefs about success, and persistence. Caregiver-child dyads (N = 202, 100 female, 35% non-White, aged 4-5, ƒ = .15) were assigned to one of three storybook conditions, highlighting the female scientist's achievements, effort, or, in a baseline condition, neither. Children were asked about their mindset, presented with a persistence task, and asked about their understanding of effort and success. Findings demonstrate that storybooks highlighting effort are associated with growth mindset, attribution of success to hard work, and increased persistence. Caregiver language echoed language from the assigned storybook, showing the importance of reading storybooks emphasizing hard work.

Miraculous, magical, or mundane? The development of beliefs about stories with divine, magical, or realistic causation.

Children's naïve theories about causal regularities enable them to differentiate factual narratives describing real events and characters from fictional narratives describing made-up events and characters (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, Cognition 113 (2): 213-225, 2009). But what happens when children are consistently presented with accounts of miraculous and causally impossible events as real occurrences? Previous research has shown that preschoolers with consistent exposure to religious teaching tend to systematically judge characters involved in fantastical or religious events as real (Corriveau et al., Cognitive Science, 39 (2), 353-382, 2015; Davoodi et al., Developmental Psychology, 52 (2), 221, 2016). In the current study, we extended this line of work by asking about the scope of the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments. Specifically, we asked whether this effect is  domain-general or domain-specific. We tested children in Iran, where regular exposure to uniform religious beliefs might influence children's reasoning about possibility in non-religious domains, in addition to the domain of religion. Children with no or minimal schooling (5- to 6-year-olds) and older elementary school students (9- to 10-year-olds) judged the reality status of different kinds of stories, notably realistic, unusual (but nonetheless realistic), religious, and magical stories. We found that while younger children were not systematic in their judgments, older children often judged religious stories as real but rarely judged magical stories as real. This developmental pattern suggests that the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments does not extend beyond their reasoning about divine intervention. Children's justifications for their reality judgments provided further support for this domain-specific influence of religious teaching.

Social robots as social learning partners: Exploring children's early understanding and learning from social robots.

Clark and Fischer propose that people interpret social robots not as social agents, but as interactive depictions. Drawing on research focusing on how children selectively learn from social others, we argue that children do not view social robots as interactive toys but instead treat them as social learning partners and critical sources of information.

If I told you everyone picked that (non-affordant) tool, would you? Children attend to conventional language when imitating and transmitting tool use.

This study explored how conventional versus instrumental language influenced children's imitation and transmission of non-affordant tool use. Rather than examining children's imitation of unnecessary actions that do not impede goal completion, we examined children's conformity with a modeled behavior that may result in sacrificing goal completion. Children (N = 96 4- to 6-year-olds) were presented with either a conventional or instrumental description of a model's actions before watching the model choose a non-affordant tool. Children who heard conventional language imitated and transmitted the model's non-affordant tool choice at significantly higher rates than when they heard instrumental language. The results have implications for children, parents, and teachers regarding the extent to which children will conform with what "we" are "supposed" to do.

Considering individual differences and variability is important in the development of the bifocal stance theory.

Jagiello and colleagues offer a bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution for understanding how individuals flexibly choose between instrumental and ritual stances in social learning. We argue that the role of culture, developmental age-related differences, and the intersectionality of these and other individual's identities need to be more fully considered in this theoretical 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.

I don't believe what you said before: Preschoolers retrospectively discount information from inaccurate speakers.

Children use speakers' past accuracy to make inferences about novel word meanings those individuals provide in the future. An open question is whether children can retrospectively reevaluate information after learning that the source was inaccurate. We addressed this question in two experiments where a speaker first introduced labels for novel objects and then revealed that she is either accurate or inaccurate in naming familiar objects. Experiment 1 showed that 3.5- to 6.5-year-olds displayed enhanced performance on a word knowledge test when they had learned novel words from a speaker who then showed herself to be an accurate labeler as opposed to an inaccurate labeler. Experiment 2 replicated this procedure but had a different speaker provide inaccurate label information. This manipulation did not affect learning, suggesting that children discount speakers and are not simply influenced by the demands of processing inaccurate information. Together, these results indicate that 3.5- to 6.5-year-olds continue to monitor the speakers' accuracy after learning new words from them, update their beliefs as accuracy data become available, and selectively retain words learned from speakers who they deem to be epistemically competent.

Putting social cognitive mechanisms back into cumulative technological culture: Social interactions serve as a mechanism for children's early knowledge acquisition.

Osiurak and Reynaud offer a unified cognitive approach to cumulative technological culture, arguing that it begins with non-social cognitive skills that allow humans to learn and develop new technical information. Drawing on research focusing on how children acquire knowledge through interactions others, we argue that social learning is essential for humans to acquire technical information.

Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony.

Humans acquire much of their knowledge from the testimony of other people. An understanding of the way that information can be conveyed via gesture and vocalization is present in infancy. Thus, infants seek information from well-informed interlocutors, supply information to the ignorant, and make sense of communicative acts that they observe from a third-party perspective. This basic understanding is refined in the course of development. As they age, children's reasoning about testimony increasingly reflects an ability not just to detect imperfect or inaccurate claims but also to assess what inferences may or may not be drawn about informants given their particular situation. Children also attend to the broader characteristics of particular informants-their group membership, personality characteristics, and agreement or disagreement with other potential informants. When presented with unexpected or counterintuitive testimony, children are prone to set aside their own prior convictions, but they may sometimes defer to informants for inherently social reasons.

Trust me, I'm a competent expert: Developmental differences in children's use of an expert's explanation quality to infer trustworthiness.

In this study, we examined how 3-, 4-, 5-, and 7-year-old children respond when informants who are labeled as experts fail to provide high-quality explanations about phenomena within their realm of expertise. We found that 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds discounted their initial trust in an expert who provided low-quality explanations in a task related to the expert's area of expertise. The 5-year-olds' distrust of the expert who provided low-quality explanations also generalized to additional learning tasks. When an expert provided explanations consistent with the expert's labeled expertise, 5-year-olds maintained a similar level of trust in the expert, but 7-year-olds displayed an increased level of trust in the expert within the expert's area of expertise. We did not find consistent preferences in 3-year-olds' judgments. We discuss the implications of these findings for age-based differences in children's relative weighting of trait-based versus real-time epistemic cues when evaluating informant reliability.

On the malleability of selective trust.

Although much research has explored the cues that young children use to determine informant credibility, little research has examined whether credibility judgments can change over time as a function of children's language environment. This study explored whether changes in the syntactic complexity of adults' testimony shifts 4- and 5-year-old children's (N = 42) credibility and learning judgments. Children from lower-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds were randomly assigned to hear a high proportion of complex language (the passive voice) or simpler language (the active voice) during 10 days of book-reading interactions with adult experimenters. Before and after the book-reading sessions, children's learning preferences for informants who used passive versus active voice were measured. Exposure to the complex passive voice led children to use syntactic complexity as a cue to make inferences about who to learn from, whereas active voice exposure resulted in no such shift. Implications for the role of the language environment in children's selective trust are discussed.

But how does it develop? Adopting a sociocultural lens to the development of intergroup bias among children.

We argue that adopting a sociocultural lens to the origins of intergroup bias is important for understanding the nature of attacking and defending behavior at a group level. We specifically propose that the potential divergence in the development of in-group affiliation and out-group derogation supports De Dreu and Gross's framework but does indicate that more emphasis on early sociocultural input is required.

Question, Explanation, Follow-Up: A Mechanism for Learning From Others?

This study explored differences in caregiver-child interactions following children's information-seeking questions. Naturalistic speech from thirty-seven 4-year-olds and their caregivers was used to explore children's information-seeking questions, the caregiver's response, and children's subsequent follow-up. Half of the families were low-socioeconomic status (SES) and the other half were mid-SES. Although children across socioeconomic groups asked a similar proportion of questions, mid-SES caregivers offered significantly more explanatory responses to causal questions as well as more noncircular explanations than low-SES caregivers. No differences were found in children's follow-up to responses given to fact-based questions; however, after hearing unsatisfactory responses to causal questions, mid-SES children were significantly more likely to provide their own explanation. Such variability in caregiver-child interaction may have implications for subsequent learning.

Learning and Socializing Preferences in Hong Kong Chinese Children.

The impact of social group information on the learning and socializing preferences of Hong Kong Chinese children were examined. Specifically, the degree to which variability in racial out-group exposure affects children's use of race to make decisions about unfamiliar individuals (Chinese, White, Southeast Asian) was investigated. Participants (N = 212; Mage  = 60.51 months) chose functions for novel objects after informants demonstrated their use; indicated with which peer group member to socialize; and were measured on racial group recognition, preference, and identification. Overall, children preferred in-group members, though out-group exposure and the relative social status of out-groups mattered as well. At a young age, children's specific experiences with different races influence how they learn and befriend others across racial group lines.

Cultural differences in the imitation and transmission of inefficient actions.

Across two studies, we explored cultural differences in children's imitation and transmission of inefficient actions. Chinese American and Caucasian American preschoolers (N=115) viewed either one or three models using two inefficient tools to perform two different tasks. In the video, when the model(s) performed the task, only the inefficient tool was available; thus, their choice to use that tool could be considered rational. Next, children were invited to complete the task with either the inefficient tool or an efficient alternative. Whereas the two cultural groups imitated a single model at similar rates, Chinese American children imitated significantly more than Caucasian American children after viewing a consensus. Similar results were found when exploring differences in information transmission. The Chinese American children were significantly more likely than their Caucasian American peers to instruct using an inefficient tool when they had initially viewed a consensus demonstrate it. We discuss these findings with respect to differences in children's use of social versus task-specific cues for learning and teaching.

Children begin with the same start-up software, but their software updates are cultural.

We propose that early in ontogeny, children's core cognitive abilities are shaped by culturally dependent "software updates." The role of sociocultural inputs in the development of children's learning is largely missing from Lake et al.'s discussion of the development of human-like artificial intelligence, but its inclusion would help move research even closer to machines that can learn and think like humans.

Preschoolers' Preference for Syntactic Complexity Varies by Socioeconomic Status.

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children choose to learn from informants who use more complex syntax (passive voice) over informants using more simple syntax (active voice). In Experiment 1 (N = 30), children viewed one informant who consistently used the passive voice and another who used active voice. When learning novel words from the two informants, children were more likely to endorse information from the passive informant. Experiment 2 (N = 32) explored whether preference for the passive informant varied by socioeconomic status (SES; eligibility for free/reduced lunch). Although higher SES children selectively preferred the passive informant, lower SES children preferred the active informant. Explanations are discussed for why SES might moderate children's sensitivity to syntactic complexity when choosing from whom to learn.

Teaching and preschoolers' ability to infer knowledge from mistakes.

For instruction to be effective, teachers must adjust the way they teach to match what learners know. We asked whether children's ability to infer what someone knows based on his or her mistakes develops alongside their teaching-children's use of more explicit teaching strategies and their ability to tailor how much information to provide in response to their pupils' mistakes. Preschoolers (N=48) were taught a simple game and were then introduced to four puppets: one puppet who played the game perfectly, two puppets who each made one mistake, and one puppet who made two mistakes. After watching each puppet play individually, children were asked to rate the puppet's understanding of the game and then were invited to teach the puppet. Children's ability to monitor the relative accuracy of the puppets-the ability to make nuanced judgments about what each puppet understood based on each puppet's unique mistakes-improved with age. Moreover, older children were more explicit and more precise teachers than younger children. They more often contrasted the learners' mistakes with what should be done and more often provided instructions that directly addressed the puppets' unique mistakes. Thus, between 3 and 5 years of age, developments in children's ability to infer knowledge from mistakes parallel developments both in the strategies children use to teach and in the amount of information they teach in response to mistakes.