Checking out the unexplained: With age, children become increasingly skeptical of surprising claims.

When presented with surprising claims, older children investigate such claims more often than younger children. The present study tests whether older children (6-7-year-olds) are more skeptical than younger children (4-5-year-olds) about surprising claims that lack supporting evidence because they expect informants to provide evidence for them. To test this hypothesis, we presented 140 4-7-year-old children (47-96 months, 46.4% girls, 53.6% boys, 86.4% with at least one parent who completed a BA degree, 50% parents with income above median) with a series of vignettes. In each vignette, the protagonist wanted to accomplish a task and needed to select the most appropriate object for that task. Before deciding which object to use, the protagonist heard a surprising claim about one of the object's properties, presented with or without supporting evidence. For example, in the supporting explanation condition, the informant stated that the smallest object was the heaviest and that they knew because they had lifted the objects. Children were then asked whether the protagonist knew which object to use and why. Contrary to expectation, children across all ages typically indicated that the protagonist had sufficient knowledge, regardless of whether an informant provided supporting evidence or not. However, with increasing age, children became more skeptical of both supported and unsupported surprising claims and increasingly stated that the protagonist should not select the object suggested by the informant. Finally, when asked to justify this judgment, older children were more likely than younger to express skepticism toward the claims, especially when presented without supporting evidence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Validation of an open source, remote web-based eye-tracking method (WebGazer) for research in early childhood.

Measuring eye movements remotely via the participant's webcam promises to be an attractive methodological addition to in-person eye-tracking in the lab. However, there is a lack of systematic research comparing remote web-based eye-tracking with in-lab eye-tracking in young children. We report a multi-lab study that compared these two measures in an anticipatory looking task with toddlers using WebGazer.js and jsPsych. Results of our remotely tested sample of 18-27-month-old toddlers (N = 125) revealed that web-based eye-tracking successfully captured goal-based action predictions, although the proportion of the goal-directed anticipatory looking was lower compared to the in-lab sample (N = 70). As expected, attrition rate was substantially higher in the web-based (42%) than the in-lab sample (10%). Excluding trials based on visual inspection of the match of time-locked gaze coordinates and the participant's webcam video overlayed on the stimuli was an important preprocessing step to reduce noise in the data. We discuss the use of this remote web-based method in comparison with other current methodological innovations. Our study demonstrates that remote web-based eye-tracking can be a useful tool for testing toddlers, facilitating recruitment of larger and more diverse samples; a caveat to consider is the larger drop-out rate.

Child internalizing and externalizing behaviors: Interplay between maternal depressive symptoms and child inhibitory control.

Maternal depression is a risk factor for child internalizing and externalizing behaviors. Aiming to investigate the moderating role of child inhibitory control on this relationship, we invited a sub-sample of dyads from the Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child Cohort study (MoBa) for a lab-based assessment (N = 92, M age = 68 months, Range = 59-80, 50% girls). Maternal depression was assessed using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II), while child behaviors were measured using the Child Behavior Check List, and inhibitory control using a child friendly version of the Flanker-task. As expected, higher levels of concurrent maternal depressive symptoms predicted higher levels of child internalizing and externalizing behaviors. Importantly, and in line with our predictions, child inhibitory control moderated the association. Lower levels of inhibitory control predicted a stronger association between concurrent maternal depressive symptoms and child behavioral outcomes. The results support prior research suggesting that concurrent maternal depression poses a risk for child development, and highlight that children with lower levels of inhibitory control are more vulnerable to negative environmental influences. These findings contribute to our understanding of the complexity of parental mental health issues on child development and suggest avenues for personalized treatment programs for families and children at risk.

Preschool Children Rarely Seek Empirical Data That Could Help Them Complete a Task When Observation and Testimony Conflict.

Children (N = 278, 34-71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the observed and testimonial evidence conflicted, children were given access to the music box during their sorting. However, children rarely explored. Indeed, they struggled to disregard the misleading testimony both when sorting the figurines and when asked about a future attempt. In contrast, children who explored the effectiveness of the figurines dismissed the misleading testimony.

Young children update their trust in an informant's claim when experience tells them otherwise.

Across two experiments, an adult informant presented 220 preschoolers (34-71 months of age) with either a correct claim or an incorrect claim about how to activate a music box by using one of two toy figures. Children were then prompted to explore the figures and to discover whether the informant's claim was correct or incorrect. Children who discovered the claim to be incorrect no longer endorsed it. Moreover, their predictions regarding a new figure's ability to activate the music box were clearly affected by the reliability of the informant's prior claim. Thus, children reassess an informant's incorrect claim about an object in light of later empirical evidence and transfer their conclusions regarding the validity of that claim to subsequent objects.