Pupils Dilate More to Harder Vocabulary Words than Easier Ones.

Understanding cognitive effort expended during assessments is essential to improving efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility within these assessments. Pupil dilation is commonly used as a psychophysiological measure of cognitive effort, yet research on its relationship with effort expended specifically during language processing is limited. The present study adds to and expands on this literature by investigating the relationships among pupil dilation, trial difficulty, and accuracy during a vocabulary test. Participants (n = 63, Mage = 19.25) completed a subset of trials from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test while seated at an eye-tracker monitor. During each trial, four colored images were presented on the monitor while a word was presented via audio recording. Participants verbally indicated which image they thought represented the target word. Words were categorized into Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty. Pupil dilation during the Medium and Hard trials was significantly greater than during the Easy trials, though the Medium and Hard trials did not significantly differ from each other. Pupil dilation in comparison to trial accuracy presented a more complex pattern, with comparisons between accurate and inaccurate trials differing depending on the timing of the stimulus presentation. These results present further evidence that pupil dilation increases with cognitive effort associated with vocabulary tests, providing insights that could help refine vocabulary assessments and other related tests of language processing.

Trusting information from friends: Adults expect it but preschoolers do not.

As adults, we might understand that beliefs often spread because people are strongly influenced by their friends, family, and other social connections. However, do we think those influences are strong enough to overrule direct evidence of a friend's unreliability? And do preschoolers expect people to show such biases toward friends and to privilege friendship over reliability? Across three experiments, we explored whether friendship influences the evaluations of trust when others learn labels for novel objects as well as personal opinions. After watching scenes involving a main character, her best friend, and a stranger, preschoolers and adults judged who would be trusted for information from the main character's perspective (third person) as well as their own (first person). Adults (n = 128, 55 female, recruited online from across the United States) expected the main character to trust information from her friend even if she had been previously inaccurate, while basing their own first-person judgments on accuracy. In contrast, 4- and 5-year-olds (n = 128, 62 female, from the United States) thought that the main character would be like themselves and prioritize accuracy over friendship. Further, preschoolers expected the main character to trust her (inaccurate) friend and (accurate) stranger equally when forming personal opinions. Thus, young children, unlike adults, do not expect others' epistemic trust to privilege friendship with the speaker over accuracy information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

Children's attributions of moral and epistemic virtue: Effects on learning and memory.

One developmental task faced by children is to identify, remember, and learn from epistemic and moral agents around them who are known to be good or virtuous. Here, in 2 studies, we examined U.S children's (N = 138; 55% female, 45% male; predominantly White, middle-class) memory processes for agents varying in moral and epistemic virtue. In Study 1, when presented with 16 faces of individuals who were said to vary in moral or epistemic virtue, children demonstrated enhanced trait memory for the characteristics of agents lacking in virtue relative to their more moral and competent counterparts. In Study 2, when presented with pairs of faces in the moral and epistemic domains, children showed enhanced content memory for information communicated by an epistemically competent individual with age. Together, these findings provide evidence that when categorizing single agents among many, children show better memory for their negative characteristics; and in a learning context, children show better retention of information communicated by more competent agents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, 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.

The sense of obligation in children's testimonial learning.

We extend Tomasello's discussion of children's developing sense of obligation to testimonial learning. First, we review a battery of behaviors in testimonial exchanges that parallel those described by Tomasello. Second, we explore the variable ways in which children hold others accountable, suggestive that children's evaluations of moral and epistemic responsibilities in joint collaborative activities are distinct.

The role of testimony in children's moral decision making: Evidence from China and United States.

What does it take know a moral truth or principle? Although testimony is an undisputed source of empirical knowledge of contingent facts, it is less clear whether it is possible to acquire "second-hand moral knowledge" (Jones, 1999; Wolff, 1998). In the present studies, 3- to 5-year-old Chinese (N = 124) and U.S. American (N = 90) children were asked to judge whether novel, distress-inducing actions were morally permissible, both independently and after either 1 or 3 adult informants had made counterintuitive judgments. Although participants made appropriate moral judgments independently, children from both countries were affected by the counterintuitive testimony provided by the adult informant(s). Moreover, Chinese children were especially receptive to such counterintuitive claims. These findings demonstrate that intuitive moral judgments based on perceived harm are common across 2 cultural groups, but adult testimony can potentially shift those judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).