Sins of omission: Children selectively explore when teachers are under-informative
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Sins_Of_Omisson_final.pdf
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895.84 KB
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Author(s)
Gweon, Hyowon
Pelton, Hannah L.
Konopka, Jaclyn A.
Schulz, Laura E
Date Issued
May 2014
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Gweon, Hyowon et al. “Sins of Omission: Children Selectively Explore When Teachers Are Under-Informative.” Cognition 132, 3 (September 2014): 335–341 © 2014 Elsevier B.V.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Do children know when people tell the truth but not the whole truth? Here we show that children accurately evaluate informants who omit information and adjust their exploratory behavior to compensate for under-informative pedagogy. Experiment 1 shows that given identical demonstrations of a toy, children (6- and 7-year-olds) rate an informant lower if the toy also had non-demonstrated functions. Experiment 2 shows that given identical demonstrations, six-year-olds explore a toy more broadly if the informant previously committed a sin of omission. These results suggest that children consider both accuracy and informativeness in evaluating others’ credibility and adjust their exploratory behavior to compensate for under-informative testimony when an informant’s credibility is in doubt.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.04.013
