Little Bayesians or little Einsteins? Probability and explanatory virtue in children's inferences

Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists – such as Einstein – do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we demonstrate in four experiments that 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children, like adults, have a robust latent scope bias that leads to inferences that do not maximize posterior probability. When faced with two explanations equally consistent with observed data, where one explanation makes an unverified prediction, children consistently preferred the explanation that does not make this prediction (Experiment 1), even if the prior probabilities are identical (Experiment 3). Additional evidence suggests that this latent scope bias may result from the same explanatory strategies used by adults (Experiments 1 and 2), and can be attenuated by strong prior odds (Experiment 4). We argue that children, like adults, rely on ‘explanatory virtues’ in inference – a strategy that often leads to normative responses, but can also lead to systematic error.     

Examining Explanatory Biases in Young Children's Biological Reasoning

Despite the well-established literature on explanation in early childhood, little is known about what constrains children's explanations. State change and negative outcomes were examined as potential explanatory biases in the domain of naïve biology, extending upon previous work in the domain of naïve physics. In two studies, preschool children (N = 70, 3- to 5-year-olds) were informed of the distinct health outcomes of characters in four between-subjects conditions (i.e., becoming ill, recovering from illness, continuous health, and continuous illness) and were asked to provide explanations. Whereas children in both studies provided relevant information for health outcomes, they more often explained outcomes that included a salient health-state change. Presence of a state change also influenced the interpretation of potentially relevant information and improved memory for health outcomes. We discuss how biases in children's explanations constrain children's reasoning and may exacerbate difficulties with reasoning about important health-related topics such as illness prevention.     

“I Want to Know More!”: Children Are Sensitive to Explanation Quality When Exploring New Information

When someone encounters an explanation perceived as weak, this may lead to a feeling of deprivation or tension that can be resolved by engaging in additional learning. This study examined to what extent children respond to weak explanations by seeking additional learning opportunities. Seven‐ to ten‐year‐olds (N = 81) explored questions and explanations (circular or mechanistic) about 12 animals using a novel Android tablet application. After rating the quality of an initial explanation, children could request and receive additional information or return to the main menu to choose a new animal to explore. Consistent with past research, there were both developmental and IQ‐related differences in how children evaluated explanation quality. But across development, children were more likely to request additional information in response to circular explanations than mechanistic explanations. Importantly, children were also more likely to request additional information in direct response to explanations that they themselves had assigned low ratings, regardless of explanation type. In addition, there was significant variability in both children's explanation evaluation and their exploration, suggesting important directions for future research. The findings support the deprivation theory of curiosity and offer implications for education.     

Comparing the Characteristics of Homeless Adults in Poland and the United States

This study compared the characteristics of probability samples of homeless adults in Poland (N = 200 from two cities) and the United States (N = 219 from one city), using measures with established reliability and validity in homeless populations. The same measures were used across nations and a systemic translation procedure assured comparability of measurement. The two samples were similar on some measures: In both nations, most homeless adults were male, many reported having dependent children and experiencing out-of-home placements when they themselves were children, and high levels of physical health problems were observed. Significant national differences were also found: Those in Poland were older, had been homeless for longer, showed lower rates on all psychiatric diagnoses assessed (including severe mental and substance abuse disorders), reported less contact with family and supportive network members, were less satisfied when they sought support from their networks, and reported fewer recent stressful life events and fewer risky sexual behaviors. Culturally-informed interpretations of these findings and their implications are presented.     

Younger and older adults’ prospective memory: the role of delay task difficulty

ABSTRACT

There is mixed evidence on the impact of delay task difficulty on prospective memory (PM) performance and little research has examined this among older adults. The present study examined younger (N = 60) and older (N = 57) adults’ prospective memory (PM) performance after completing an easy or difficult Raven’s matrices task. To assess whether delay difficulty impacted how often participants thought about their PM intention, participants were asked to report on what they thought about during the delay task itself and retrospectively after all tasks were completed. Younger adults outperformed older adults on the PM task; however, delay task difficulty had no impact PM for either age group. Reports of thinking about the intention during the delay task differed by age group depending whether they were online or retrospective, however, overall greater reports of thinking about the intention was positively associated with PM performance.     

What can boys and girls do? Preschoolers’ perspectives regarding gender roles across domains of behavior

Previous research has examined at what age and in what contexts males and females develop gender-congruent stereotypes. Research indicates that social experience may provide a great influence on the presence of such stereotypes, but this is likely influenced by the development of gender schemas. The current study interviewed 99 children (3–6.5 years) in a sub-rural Midwestern university community. Females (N = 51, M _age = 4.6, SD = 0.73) and males (N = 48, M _age = 4.6, SD = 0.82) were individually asked who—boys, girls, or both—can do particular (1) occupations, (2) activities, (3) aggressive behaviors, and (4) prosocial behaviors. Generally, males tended to express holding no stereotypic beliefs, indicating gender-congruent expectations for only 2 items in one of the domains; however, females expressed multiple stereotypic beliefs for each of the four contexts. Social and cognitive explanations for these phenomena are discussed. The current study is an important addition to the existing literature in that preschool teachers and parents alike might be able to assist children to better develop activities and behavioral habits such that gender-related stereotypes fail to develop.     

Investigating the origins of political views: biases in explanation predict conservative attitudes in children and adults

We tested the hypothesis that political attitudes are influenced by an information‐processing factor – namely, a bias in the content of everyday explanations. Because many societal phenomena are enormously complex, people's understanding of them often relies on heuristic shortcuts. For instance, when generating explanations for such phenomena (e.g., why does this group have low status?), people often rely on facts that they can retrieve easily from memory – facts that are skewed toward inherent or intrinsic features (e.g., this group is unintelligent). We hypothesized that this bias in the content of heuristic explanations leads to a tendency to (1) view socioeconomic stratification as acceptable and (2) prefer current societal arrangements to alternative ones, two hallmarks of conservative ideology. Moreover, since the inherence bias in explanation is present across development, we expected it to shape children's proto‐political judgments as well. Three studies with adults and 4‐ to 8‐year‐old children (N = 784) provided support for these predictions: Not only did individual differences in reliance on inherent explanations uniquely predict endorsement of conservative views (particularly the stratification‐supporting component; Study 1), but manipulations of this explanatory bias also had downstream consequences for political attitudes in both children and adults (Studies 2 and 3). This work contributes to our understanding of the origins of political attitudes.     

Children’s judgements of the obligation to help: The role of relationships

ABSTRACT

Children at ages 7 (N = 24, M _age = 6.96, SD _age =.20), 9 (N = 29, M _age = 8.76, SD _age =.44), and 11 (N = 25, M _age = 10.76, SD _age =.66), and adults (N = 30) made judgements about the obligation to help when it conflicts with a personal desire. Across ages, the obligation to help was judged to be strongest when there were positive or neutral past interactions with the person in need of help, compared to mean past interactions. Expectation of a future friendship predicted the obligation to help, even after controlling for age and sex. However, we found no effect of children helping gender in-group members more. Evidence for altruism was not found: expected positive emotions did not predict the obligation to help. We conclude that an expectation of future relationship is the strongest predictor of helping obligation.     

儿童在因果知识领域内的选择性学习

儿童的选择性学习是目前认知发展领域的热点问题。儿童在因果知识领域内的选择性学习(即选择性因果学习)对于回答儿童如何获取知识这个经典问题具有重要意义。儿童的选择性因果学习表现在对他人解释的辨别、评估与采纳上。他们会主动向可靠的信息提供者寻求解释, 并在接收回答后表现出选择性跟进反应。对于他人的回答, 年幼儿童不仅能根据言语线索辨别出解释性陈述, 还能依据解释的结构特征选择更好的陈述加以采纳, 年长儿童甚至可以从不同模式的解释中灵活地学习更适宜的因果知识。未来研究应深入关注解释的其它特征在儿童选择性因果学习中的作用, 进一步探讨选择性因果学习的认知机制。     

The metacognitive disambiguation effect

From an early age, children show a tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds of objects. Accounts of this tendency have not addressed whether children develop a metacognitive representation of what they are doing. In 3 experiments (each N = 48), preschoolers received a test of the metacognitive disambiguation effect, which involved deciding whether the referent of a novel label was located in a bucket of things “I know” or bucket of things “I don’t know.” Most 4-year-olds passed this test, whereas most 3-year-olds did not. Children’s performance was predicted by their ability to report whether various words and pseudowords were ones that they knew, even after age and vocabulary size were controlled. As children develop an awareness of their lexical knowledge/ignorance, they also develop a metacognitive representation of their tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds.     

Asking Parents to Prepare Children for an Event: Altering Parental Instructions Influences Children's Recall

The authors investigated whether manipulating parents' goals regarding their discussion of an upcoming staged event with their 6-year-old children differentially influenced the children's recall. Parents (n = 62) were asked to prepare their child for a staged novel event—“visiting the pretend zoo”—to take place 1 day later. One group (inform) was asked to simply tell their child about the event, whereas a second group (discuss) was asked to engage their child in conversation and seek their child's perspective. A third group of parents (control) read an unrelated story to their child. Relative to parents in the control and inform conditions, parents in the discuss condition engaged their children in richer, more diverse, and complex conversation and their children made more contributions to the conversation. When their recall was tested 1 week later, however, children in the inform condition, relative to the discuss and control conditions, recalled more correct information overall. The reports of children in the inform and discuss conditions were highly accurate, and more so than those of children in the control condition. The findings and their possible underlying mechanisms are discussed.     

Assessing Knowledge Through Gesture: Using Children's Hands to Read Their Minds

Is the information that gesture provides about a child's understanding of a task accessible not only to experimenters who are trained in coding gesture but also to untrained observers? Twenty adults were asked to describe the reasoning of 12 different children, each videotaped responding to a Piagetian conservation task. Six of the children on the videotape produced gestures that conveyed the same information as their nonconserving spoken explanations, and 6 produced gestures that conveyed different information from their nonconserving spoken explanations. The adult observers displayed more uncertainty in their appraisals of children who produced different information in gesture and speech than in their appraisals of children who produced the same information in gesture and speech. Moreover, the adults were able to incorporate the information conveyed in the children's gestures into their own spoken appraisals of the children's reasoning. These data suggest that, even without training, adults form impressions of children's knowledge based not only on what children say with their mouths but also on what they say with their hands.     

Children's explanations of the intentions underlying others' behaviour

This study investigated developmental differences in children's explanations of the intentions underlying the behaviours of others, including behaviours that conflicted with their expectations. Children aged 6–13 and adults explained the intentions underlying their predictions of behaviour following stories with ambiguous, positive, and negative cues. Children were then presented with experimenter–provided conflicting behaviour and explained again. Results indicated that with no clear cues, children and adults had optimistic expectations. When cues were provided, participants across development provided explanations consistent with positive cues, but children under age 10 were reluctant to provide explanations consistent with negative cues, despite good recall. When explaining conflicting behaviour, people may hesitate to overlook suspicions of negative intent sometimes even in the face of good behaviour, and this reluctance may increase with age. Findings suggest we may all overcome an optimistic bias, but children under age 10 may struggle more to do so.     

Divergent effects of instructed and reported emotion regulation strategies on children’s memory for emotional information

ABSTRACT

Distraction can reduce adults’ memory for emotion-eliciting information, whereas reappraisal can preserve or enhance it. Yet, when given instructions to use specific emotion regulation (ER) strategies, adults report using other strategies too. The consequences of non-instructed strategy use within instructed ER paradigms are rarely examined. We investigated how both instructed and non-instructed but reported strategies related to memory for emotional information in childhood. Older (N?=?69; 8- to 10-year-olds; 24 girls) and younger (N?=?65; 5- to 7-year-olds; 35 girls) children received instructions to use cognitive distraction, reappraisal, or do nothing (control) before and after viewing a negative emotional film clip. Children were later interviewed about what they remembered about the film, and reported the ER strategies they used during it. Memory did not vary across instructed ER strategy conditions, and reported strategies did not relate to memory differently for older and younger children. Consistent with adult work, reported cognitive distraction related to poorer memory. Different reappraisal types were reported, but only situation-focused reappraisal was linked to better memory. In sum, children’s reported cognitive distraction and reappraisal strategies related to memory for emotional information differently. Thus, ER strategies divergently relate to what children remember about their emotional experiences.     

“I don't know but I know who to ask”: 12‐month‐olds actively seek information from knowledgeable adults

Active social communication is an effective way for infants to learn about the world. Do pre‐verbal and pre‐pointing infants seek epistemic information from their social partners when motivated to obtain information they cannot discover independently? The present study investigated whether 12‐month‐olds (N = 30) selectively seek information from knowledgeable adults in situations of referential uncertainty. In a live experiment, infants were introduced to two unfamiliar adults, an Informant (reliably labeling objects) and a Non‐Informant (equally socially engaging, but ignorant about object labels). At test, infants were asked to make an impossible choice—locate a novel referent among two novel objects. When facing epistemic uncertainty—but not at other phases of the procedure—infants selectively referred to the Informant rather than the Non‐Informant. These results show that pre‐verbal infants use social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/23dLPsa-fAY     

Porn,Peers, and Performing Oral Sex: The Mediating Role of Peer Norms on Pornography’s Influence Regarding Oral Sex

ABSTRACT

The goal of this study was to offer insights into how pornography use might be linked to young adults’ sexual experiences via the mediating role of peer norms (i.e., their perceptions of what same-sex peers do sexually). We focused on oral sex behavior, as it is common in pornography and among young people. Young adults (N = 349; ages 19–30; 54% female) were recruited through a crowdsourcing website. Participants completed an anonymous online survey about the frequency that they observed various sexual behaviors in online pornography, the frequency that they engaged in these behaviors, and their perceptions of the frequency that their peers engaged in these behaviors. Frequency of viewing cunnilingus (men) or fellatio (women) in pornography predicted how often they engaged in oral sex, and this association was mediated by their perceptions of how frequently their peers engaged in oral sex. Peer norms did not mediate how frequently they received oral sex. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for understanding how pornography may relate to young people’s social norms surrounding oral sex and their performance of sexual behaviors, as well as for understanding generally how media consumption relates to adoption of media behaviors through suggesting a social norm.     

Evidence for an explanation advantage in naïve biological reasoning

The present studies compare young children’s explanations and predictions for the biological phenomenon of contamination. In Study 1, 36 preschoolers and 24 adults heard vignettes concerning contamination, and were asked either to make a prediction or to provide an explanation. Even 3-year-olds readily supplied contamination-based explanations, and most children mentioned an unseen mechanism (germs, contact through bodily fluids). Moreover, unlike adults who performed at ceiling across both explanation and prediction tasks, children were significantly more accurate with their explanations than their predictions. In Study 2, we varied the strength of cues regarding the desirability of the contaminated substance (N = 24 preschoolers). Although desirability affected responses, for both levels of desirability participants were significantly more accurate on explanation than prediction questions. Altogether, these studies demonstrate a significant “explanation advantage” for children’s reasoning in the domain of everyday biology.     

Information structuring improves recall of emergency discharge information: a randomized clinical trial

This article examines the extent to which structuring Emergency Department discharge information improves the ability to recall that information, and whether such benefits interact with relevant prior knowledge. Using three samples of students with different levels of prior medical knowledge, we investigated the amount of information recalled after structured vs. non-structured presentation of information. Across all student samples, the structured discharge information led to a relative increase in recalled items of 17% compared to non-structured discharge information (M = 9.70, SD = 4.96 vs. M = 8.31, SD = 4.93). In the sample with least medical knowledge, however, the structured discharge information resulted in a relative increase in recall by 42% (M = 8.12 vs. M = 5.71). These results suggest that structuring discharge information can be a useful tool to improve recall of information and is likely to be most beneficial for patient populations with lower levels of medical knowledge.     

An investigation into the impact of acute stress on encoding in older adults

Acute psychological stress commonly occurs in young and older adults’ lives. Though several studies have examined the influence of stress on how young adults learn new information, the present study is the first to directly examine these effects in older adults. Fifty older adults (M age = 71.9) were subjected to either stress induction or a control task before learning two types of information: a short video and a series of pictures. Twenty-four hours later, they were exposed to misleading information about the video and then completed memory tests for the video and pictures. Heart rate and cortisol measures suggest that a physiological stress response was successfully induced. Though pre-encoding stress had little impact on memory accuracy, stress did influence errors of omission on the cued recall test for the video. Findings are discussed in the context of previous research examining the effects of stress on memory in older adults.