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    Source reliability in the development of children’s understanding of causal systems

    Symons, Germaine and Tolmie, A. and Oaksford, Mike (2015) Source reliability in the development of children’s understanding of causal systems. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 1419 , pp. 413-418. ISSN 1613-0073.

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    Abstract

    Children have been shown to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources from as young as 3 or 4 ye ars old using the selective trust paradigm (Koenig, Clément & Harris, 2004). However, it is unclear whether children are discriminating between informants because they have some epistemic awareness regarding the knowledge of the informants, or because they regard the behaviour of the unreliable informants as bizarre. Th e current experiment manipulates source reliability in a more naturalistic way (science teacher vs. nursery child), and looks at the effects of age (6 - 7, 8 - 9, 10 - 11 years old) on children’s’ predictions relating to a familiar causal system - cars on an in clined plane , where height, surface friction, and starting point on the slope, as well as the weight of the car, can be changed . Children are either told unintuitive information coming from a differentially reliable source, or no information, regarding the effect of weight . They are then asked to make predictions regarding how far the car travels. Children in the high reliable condition are more likely t o change their predictions regarding the effect of weight following information from the more reliable so urce. This may occur in older children only, but more research needs to be done.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: Proceedings of the EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science. 4th European Conference on Cognitive Science. 11th International Conference on Cognitive Science Torino, Italy, September 25-27, 2015.
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): source reliability, testimony, social cognition
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 21 Sep 2016 13:59
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:26
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16148

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