Gaze following among toddlers

Children's cooperative activities with their peers become markedly coordinated during the 3rd year of life. During these activities, the child needs to follow his/her peers’ gaze to objects, and look at the same objects to initiate coordinated action. Since 3-year-olds’ ability to follow their peers’ gaze has not been studied, we experimentally investigated this in our study. In the experimental trials, an experimenter induced a child (looker) to look at a doll on display, and observed the reaction of another child (follower) who was in front of the looker (and not looking at the doll). In the control trials, the experimenter displayed the doll in an identical manner when the follower was alone. The followers followed the gaze of the lookers, looking at the doll in approximately 90% of the experimental trials, compared with 20% of the control trials. These results indicate that 3-year-olds can follow their peers’ gaze.     

4～6岁儿童对“偶得物品”与“拥有物品”的分享行为

采用被试内设计法,在三种实验条件下考察180名4～6岁儿童的分享判断及其对“偶得物品”与“拥有物品”的分享行为的发展。结果发现:(1)儿童在对分享故事情境进行不充当角色的判断时,90%的4岁儿童和100%的5岁、6岁儿童能做出正确判断。当他们进行充当故事中人物角色的判断时,4岁儿童判断的正确率降低到81%,5岁和6岁儿童的判断无变化。(2)4岁儿童中大约四分之一的人能够把在实验室情境中偶然得到的、自己喜欢的物品让给未得到该物品的同伴分享,能够这样做的5岁儿童大约有一半,而6岁儿童能够这样做的人达到七成以上,从4岁到6岁,发展趋势非常明显。(3)在对“自己拥有的”物品的分享上,大多数4～6岁儿童都不能将其让给在竞赛中失败、未获得该物品的同伴一同分享。(4)儿童在对分享情境的判断与他们的真实分享行为之间存在着不一致现象。     

The Influence of Unrestricted Information Exchange on Willingness to Share Information With Outsiders

This study addressed how engaging in different forms of information exchange within a group is related to group members' willingness to share risk information with outsiders. Drawing from social exchange theories, we focused on 3 unrestricted forms of information exchange: pure‐generalized, group‐generalized, and productive. We hypothesized that individuals' intentions to share information with outsiders would be associated positively with engagement in pure or group‐generalized exchanges and negatively with productive exchange. The hypotheses were supported with data from a national survey of U.S. growers (N = 452) that examined their information‐sharing behaviors with other parties inside and outside their local region. The findings have broad implications for understanding information sharing within and across groups.