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Related Experiment Video

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An Experimental Analysis of Children's Ability to Provide a False Report about a Crime

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Cognitive Foundations of Learning from Testimony.

Paul L Harris¹, Melissa A Koenig², Kathleen H Corriveau³

¹Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138;

Annual Review of Psychology

|August 11, 2017

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Children

Keywords:

appraisal counterintuitive informants testimony trust unobservable

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Development
Social Psychology
Linguistics

Background:

Human knowledge acquisition heavily relies on testimony.
Infants possess an innate understanding of communicative acts and information seeking.

Purpose of the Study:

To explore the developmental trajectory of children's understanding and reasoning about testimony.
To investigate how children assess informant credibility and handle conflicting information.

Main Methods:

Observational studies of infant communication.
Experimental tasks assessing children's evaluation of testimony and informant characteristics.
Analysis of children's reasoning about accuracy, informant situations, and social factors.

Main Results:

Infants demonstrate basic information-seeking and understanding of testimony.
Children's reasoning about testimony becomes more sophisticated with age, including assessing informant accuracy and situational context.
Children consider informant group membership, personality, and agreement with others when evaluating testimony.
Children may override their own beliefs based on testimony but sometimes defer for social reasons.

Conclusions:

Children's ability to process and reason about testimony develops significantly throughout childhood.
Social factors and informant characteristics play a crucial role in children's acceptance of testimony.
Understanding testimony is fundamental to social learning and knowledge acquisition in humans.