As adults, not only do we choose what we prefer, we also tend to adapt our preferences according to our previous choices. We do this even when our choices were blind and we could not have had any previous preference for the option we chose. These blind choice-induced preferences are thought to result from cognitive dissonance as an effort to reconcile our choices and values. In the present preregistered study, we asked when this phenomenon develops. We reasoned that cognitive dissonance may emerge around 2 years of age in connection with the development of children's self-concept. We presented N=200 children aged 16 to 36 months with a blind choice between two toys, and then tested whether their choice had induced a preference for the chosen, and a devaluation of the discarded, toy.Indeed, children's choice-induced preferences substantially increased with age. 26-to 36-months-old children preferred a neutral over the previously blindly discarded toy, but the previously chosen over the neutral toy, in line with cognitive dissonance predictions. Younger infants showed evidence against such blind choice-induced preferences, indicating its emergence around 2 years of age. Contrary to our hypotheses, the emergence of blind choice-induced preferences was not related to measures of selfconcept development in the second year of life. Our results suggest that cognitive dissonance develops around 2 years. We speculate about cognitive mechanisms that underlie this development, including later-developing aspects of the self-concept and increasingly abstract representational abilities.
We provide normative data for a new set of 313 colourised line drawings. The drawings were standardised on name agreement ( N = 60 participants), image agreement ( N = 34), conceptual familiarity ( N = 36), age of acquisition ( N = 35), and imageability ( N = 35). Objective visual complexity measures are given for the pictures, and objective word frequencies are provided for the modal names of the drawings. Reliability measures for the collected norms are very high. There are high levels of agreement between the names given by the participants and the drawings and comparative analyses indicate that the distribution of name agreement scores is very similar in both our own database and the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al., 2018). A novel “picture-choice task” used to assess name-image agreement ( N = 30) reveals that the great majority of the IMABASE pictures that are also present in MultiPic are rated as providing better pictorial representations of the corresponding concepts. Finally, most of the correlations are comparable with those reported in other normative studies on colourised drawings. The whole set of pictures is freely available from https://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/~lead/imabase/ and the norms are available as Supplementary Material.
People sometimes commit 'egocentric errors', failing to ignore their own perspective when interpreting others' communication. Training imitationinhibition, when participants perform the opposite action from another person, facilitates subsequent perspective-taking in adults. This study tested whether imitation-inhibition training also facilitates perspective-taking in 3-to 6-yearolds, an age where egocentric perspective may be particularly influential. Children participated in a 10-min imitation-inhibition, imitation, or non-social-inhibition training (white, n = 25 per condition, 33 female, period: 2018-2021), then the communicative-perspective-taking Director task. Training had a significant effect (F(2, 71) = 3.316, p = .042, η 2 = .085): on critical trials, the imitation-inhibitiongroup selected the correct object more often than the other groups. Imitationinhibition training specifically enhanced the perspective-taking process possibly by highlighting the distinction between self and other.
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