Infants track the reliability of potential informants
Tummeltshammer, Kristen S. and Wu, Rachel and Sobel, D.M. and Kirkham, Natasha Z. (2014) Infants track the reliability of potential informants. Psychological Science 25 (9), pp. 1730-1738. ISSN 0956-7976.
Abstract
Across two eye-tracking experiments, we showed that infants are sensitive to the statistical reliability of informative cues and selective in their use of information generated by such cues. We familiarized 8-month-olds with faces (Experiment 1) or arrows (Experiment 2) that cued the locations of animated animals with different degrees of reliability. The reliable cue always cued a box containing an animation, whereas the unreliable cue cued a box that contained an animation only 25% of the time. At test, infants searched longer in the boxes that were reliably cued, but did not search longer in the boxes that were unreliably cued. At generalization, when boxes were cued that never contained animations before, only infants in the face experiment followed the reliable cue. These results provide the first evidence that even young infants can track the reliability of potential informants and use this information judiciously to modify their future behavior.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | cognitive development, social cognition, learning |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Jul 2014 10:16 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:11 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/10195 |
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