Infants prefer to imitate a reliable person

Poulin‐Dubois, Diane; Brooker, Ivy; Polonia, Alexandra

doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2011.01.006

Cited by 71 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Infants as young as 14-months-old have shown some ability to discount unreliable informants. For instance, after being introduced to one informant who appropriately showed enthusiasm when looking inside a container holding an object (the “reliable looker”) and another who inappropriately showed enthusiasm because the container held no object (the “unreliable looker”), infants demonstrated understanding of the informants’ differing reliability in three ways: they were more likely to follow the eye gaze of the reliable looker over the unreliable one (Chow, Poulin-Dubois, & Lewis, 2008), more likely to expect the reliable looker but not the unreliable one to demonstrate appropriate looking in another task (Poulin-Dubois & Chow, 2009), and more likely to imitate the reliable looker but not the unreliable one (Poulin-Dubois, Brooker, & Polonia, 2011). Fourteen-month-olds have also shown the ability to prefer to imitate an informant who has confidently and correctly interacted with familiar objects over an informant who has interacted incompetently with uncertainty (Zmyj, Buttelman, Carpenter, & Baum, 2010; see also Birch, Akmal, & Frampton, 2010).…”

Section: What Is Developing and What Is Stable?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowing when to doubt: Developing a critical stance when learning from others.

Mills

2013

Developmental Psychology

343

220

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Children may be biased towards accepting information as true, but the fact remains that children are exposed to misinformation from many sources, and mastering the intricacies of doubt is necessary. The current article examines this issue, focusing on understanding developmental changes and consistencies in children’s ability to take a critical stance towards information. Research is reviewed on children’s ability to detect ignorance, inaccuracy, incompetence, deception, and distortion. Particular emphasis is placed on what this research indicates about how children are reasoning about when to trust and when to doubt. The remainder of the article proposes a framework to evaluate preexisting research and encourage further research, closing with a discussion of several other overarching questions that need to be considered in order to develop a model to explain developmental, individual, and situational differences in children’s ability to evaluate information.

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Section: What Is Developing and What Is Stable?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowing when to doubt: Developing a critical stance when learning from others.

Mills

2013

Developmental Psychology

343

220

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“…For example, in an unreliable-labeler task, 16-month-olds looked longer at an agent who provided incorrect labels for familiar objects if she faced the objects than if she faced away from them (Koenig & Echols, 2003; for related work with preschoolers, see Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004;Koenig & Harris, 2005). Building on these results, Poulin-Dubois and her colleagues tested 14-to 16-month-olds in a series of unreliable-looker tasks: These examined whether infants, after watching an agent act in a manner either consistent or inconsistent with her epistemic states in a first context, would hold expectations about her behavior in a second context (Chow et al, 2008;Chow & Poulin-Dubois, 2009;Poulin-Dubois et al, 2011). In the first context, the agent expressed excitement ("Wow!")…”

Section: Epistemic States and The Consistency Principlementioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Baillargeon¹,

Scott²,

He³

et al. 2015

APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition.

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IntroductionConsider the following scene: A man wearing a backpack is pacing leisurely back and forth in a large airport room. As he strolls, he occasionally crosses his arms, twirls the dangling straps of his backpack, or stuffs his hands in his pant pockets. At one point, he sits down, takes off his backpack, and removes from it a bag filled with assorted gummy bears; as he peers intently inside the bag, he selects and eats, one at a time, five red gummy bears.As adults, we would have no difficulty interpreting the man's actions. We might view his initial actions-pacing, crossing his arms, and so on-as intentional (as opposed to accidental) though not as directed toward any particular goal. In contrast, we might perceive his subsequent actions-removing the bag of gummy bears from his backpack and eating five red ones in succession-as both intentional and goal-directed. In analyzing these actions, we might build an explanation that attributes to the man a causally coherent set of motivational and epistemic mental states: He wants to eat gummy bears, he is particularly fond of red ones, and so when he spies one in the bag, he removes it and eats it.Next, consider a new scene: As the man is happily chewing on red gummy bears, he notices a second man approaching who is carrying two heavy suitcases. At this point, our scene might unfold according to different scenarios. In one, the first man greets the second man, offers to carry one of the suitcases, and holds out his bag of gummy bears. In another scenario, the first man continues to watch the second man but makes no move to approach him. In yet another scenario, the first man sticks out a leg to trip the second man, causing him to fall heavily.As adults, we would interpret and evaluate the first man's actions in the three scenarios very differently. In the first scenario, we might infer that the two men have a social group in common: They might be friends, coworkers, or relatives, for example. In the second scenario, we 3 would conclude that the two men are strangers. In both the first and second scenarios, we would view the first man's behavior as acceptable: Offering help and sharing food are expected prosocial behaviors in interactions with ingroup, but not outgroup, individuals. In contrast, the first man's behavior in the third scenario would seem to us beyond the pale: Unprovoked harmful actions, even against outgroup individuals, are generally viewed as unacceptable. We would categorize the first man as an antisocial lout, and we might file away distinctive characteristics as possible markers of a social group to be avoided in the future.Our discussion of the two scenes above illustrates the rich analyses that adults spontaneously engage in when watching others act. What are the developmental origins of these interpretations? Over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of research on social cognition in infancy. This research can be roughly organized into two sets of questions that map neatly onto the two scenes above. First, when watching an agen...

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“…Infants also make attributions to a person based on prior accuracy or reliability. For example, by 14 months of age, infants are more likely to attribute beliefs (Poulin-Dubois & Chow, 2009) and follow the gaze (Chow, Poulin-Dubois, & Lewis, 2008) of a model whose affective and communicative cues have been accurate and reliable (same reliability manipulation as Poulin-Dubois et al, 2011, described above). What has not been demonstrated is whether infants make global generalizations based on a person’s record of verbal accuracy, as older children do, and believe that an accurate as opposed to an inaccurate source is a more worthy candidate for them to help.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It was expected that 18-month-old infants would be able to use their growing vocabulary to track the verbal reliability of a speaker and thus be less willing to learn a novel label from an inaccurate source, as has been previously shown with 24-month-olds (Koenig & Woodward, 2010; Krogh-Jespersen & Echols, 2012). With regard to learning new actions, it was expected that infants would only expect someone who seemed to possess conventional knowledge to produce actions that are efficient and reasonable (e.g., Csibra & Gergely, 2009; Poulin-Dubois et al, 2011; Rakoczy et al, 2009; Zmyj et al, 2010), and thus be less likely to imitate someone previously epistemically unreliable on a rational imitation task. Finally, considering that only older children ascribe broad positive attributes to a person based on his or her verbal accuracy (Brosseau-Liard & Birch, 2010) and that nonepistemic characteristics such as kinship, familiarity, and reciprocity appear to influence older children’s prosocial behavior (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2010; see Warneken & Tomasello, 2009 for a review), it was considered unlikely that young infants would reduce their willingness to help due to a speaker’s verbal inaccuracy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is a Bird an Apple? The Effect of Speaker Labeling Accuracy on Infants' Word Learning, Imitation, and Helping Behaviors

Brooker

Poulin‐Dubois

2013

Infancy

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This study examined infants’ sensitivity to a speaker’s verbal accuracy and whether the reliability of the speaker had an effect on their selective trust. Forty-nine 18-month-old infants were exposed to a speaker who either accurately or inaccurately labeled familiar objects. Subsequently, the speaker administered a series of tasks in which infants had an opportunity to: learn a novel word, imitate the speaker’s “irrational” actions, and help the speaker obtain an out-of-reach object. In contrast to infants in the accurate (reliable) condition, those in the inaccurate (unreliable) condition performed more poorly on a word-learning task and were less likely to imitate. All infants demonstrated high rates of instrumental helping behavior. These results are the first to demonstrate that infants as young as 18 months of age cannot only detect a speaker’s verbal inaccuracy but also use this information to attenuate their word recognition and learning of novel actions.

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Infants prefer to imitate a reliable person

Cited by 71 publications

References 36 publications

Knowing when to doubt: Developing a critical stance when learning from others.

Knowing when to doubt: Developing a critical stance when learning from others.

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Is a Bird an Apple? The Effect of Speaker Labeling Accuracy on Infants' Word Learning, Imitation, and Helping Behaviors

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