Unifying pedagogical reasoning and epistemic trust

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Social Learning Theory
• Epistemology

Background:

• Children learn from others, but face risks from unreliable informants.
• Pedagogical reasoning helps children identify helpful teachers.
• Epistemic trust research focuses on discerning trustworthy information sources.

Purpose of the Study:

• To unify pedagogical reasoning and epistemic trust research.
• To present a formal analysis of learning from informants.
• To explain robust inferences from knowledgeable and helpful informants.

Main Methods:

• Formal analysis of learning from informants.
• Comparison of a new model with standard accounts of learning from teaching.
• Evaluation of the model's prediction of children's behavior in epistemic trust tasks.

Main Results:

• Teaching from knowledgeable, helpful informants supports robust inferences.
• The proposed model better predicts inferences in pedagogical situations.
• The model explains children's epistemic trust behavior using knowledge and helpfulness.

Conclusions:

• Learning from testimony is a joint inference over informant's knowledge and helpfulness.
• Epistemic trust depends on assessing informant's knowledge and helpfulness.
• This unified framework has implications for understanding child development and learning.