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Epistemic States and Traits: Preschoolers Appreciate the Differential Informativeness of Situation‐Specific and Person‐Specific Cues to Knowledge
Author(s) -
BrosseauLiard Patricia E.,
Birch Susan A. J.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01662.x
Subject(s) - psychology , identity (music) , cognitive psychology , cue dependent forgetting , sensory cue , social psychology , developmental psychology , acoustics , physics
Previous research has demonstrated that preschoolers can use situation‐specific (e.g., visual access) and person‐specific (e.g., prior accuracy) cues to infer what others know. The present studies investigated whether 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds appreciate the differential informativeness of these types of cues. In Experiment 1 ( N = 50), children used others’ prior labeling accuracy as a cue when learning labels for, but not the visual identity of, hidden objects. In Experiment 2 ( N = 64), with both cues present, children attended more to visual access than prior accuracy when learning the visual identity of, but not labels for, hidden objects. These findings demonstrate that children appreciate the difference between situation‐ and person‐specific cues and flexibly evaluate these cues depending on what information they are seeking.