Savvy or Haphazard? Comparing Preschoolers’ Performance Across Selective Learning Tasks Based on Different Epistemic Indicators

ABSTRACT

Children frequently select learning sources based on epistemic cues, or cues pertaining to informants’ knowledge. Previous research has shown that preschoolers preferentially learn from informants who have been accurate in the past, appear confident, or have had visual access to relevant information. The present series of studies aimed to investigate the relation between these 3 types of epistemic selective learning abilities in 176 children ages 3 years to 6 years. Results indicated that children’s performance was mostly uncorrelated across the different selective learning tasks and tasks measuring theory of mind and executive function were not found to predict any selective learning skills. Implications for the reliability and current conceptual understanding of these selective learning tasks are discussed.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the following individuals for assistance with participant recruitment and data collection, entry, coding, and verification: Bianca D’Agostino, Isabelle Cossette, Grace Easton, Jean-Christophe Goulet-Pelletier, Alissa Langlois, Marie-Pier Millette, Noreen Rahmani, Kignonh Soro, and Michael Slinger. Many thanks to the child participants, their parents, and the participating day-care centers.

Notes

¹ The nature of informants differed across the three tasks: Videotaped adults served as informants for one task and puppets served as informants for two tasks. Puppets seemed the best choice for SL-Visual to have a live demonstration with tangible boxes; it would not have been practical to have multiple adult informants physically present, and previous research has mainly demonstrated children’s successful understanding of visual access in a live (rather than virtual) context (e.g.,O’Neill, Astington, & Flavell, 1992; Robinson et al., 2008). “Real” people were, however, necessary for SL-Confidence because puppets cannot demonstrate nonverbal confidence/hesitation cues. SL-Accuracy could conceivably have been designed with either type of informant; we used puppets out of convenience.

² Upon further examination, the version effect on SL-Confidence emerged on the first two of four trials, and there appeared to be a preference for the answer provided by the second informant. This finding could indicate a preference for the second individual, a preference for those two particular answer options, or a recency effect; regardless of the reason for this difference, it disappeared on Trials 3 and 4. Potentially, children may have needed a few trials to “catch on” to the confidence indicators and rely on more superficial strategies on the first few trials. As for the SL-Visual version effect, no clear explanation emerged: It was present on all trials but Trial 3 and therefore did not appear to systematically depend on one particular picture, on a preference for a particular side, or on a preference for a particular puppet, as these things alternated between trials. In general, it may be best to conclude that performance on the SL-Visual task was unreliable in this age group.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Discovery Grant from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada [2015-05775] to the first author, as well as a Start-Up Grant from the University of Ottawa.