One of the greatest challenges of developmental psychology is figuring out what children are thinking. This is particularly difficult in early childhood, for children who are prelinguistic or are just beginning to speak their first words. In this stage, children’s responses are commonly measured by presenting young children with a limited choice between one of a small number of options (e.g., “Do you want X or Y?”). A tendency to choose one response in these tasks may be taken as an indication of a child’s preference or understanding. Adults’ responses are known to exhibit order biases when they are asked questions. The current set of experiments looks into the following question:
do children demonstrate response biases
? Together, we show that 1) toddlers demonstrate a robust verbal recency bias when asked “or” questions in a lab-based task and a naturalistic corpus of caretaker-child speech interactions, 2) the recency bias weakens with age, and 3) the recency bias strengthens as the syllable-length of the choices gets longer. Taken together, these results indicate that children show a different type of response bias than adults, recency instead of primacy. Further, the results may suggest that this bias stems from increased constraints on children’s working memory.
Preschoolers use others’ behaviours to make inferences about what traits they possess (Harris et al., 2018, Ann. Rev. Psychol., 69, 251). The current study examined whether 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds also associate others’ behaviour with how they appear on the surface. Specifically, we asked whether children's sensitivity to different face–traits (e.g., Cogsdill et al., 2014, Psychol. Sci., 25, 1132) would bias them to associate knowledgeable behaviours with faces that adults rate as highly competent‐ or trustworthy‐looking. We find that preschoolers expect puppets with trustworthy‐looking faces to be knowledgeable about the functions of familiar objects. In contrast, children did not match a puppet's knowledge to facial features that adults rate as varying in competence. These data suggest that children, like adults, are biased to associate facial appearance and behaviour. Furthermore, this bias appears to be rooted in a response to the same facial features that have been found to govern judgements of trustworthiness across development (e.g., Jessen & Grossmann, 2016, J. Cogn. Neurosci., 28, 1728).
What is already known on this subject?
Preschoolers selectively trust others using epistemic and non‐epistemic cues (Harris et al., 2018).
Preschoolers associate specific faces with trustworthiness and competence (Cogsdill et al., 2014).
What the present study adds?
Preschoolers infer that trustworthy‐looking characters will behave knowledgeably.
Preschoolers do not infer that competent‐looking characters will behave knowledgeably.
Children's reliability judgements are influenced by others’ appearance.
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