Cake or broccoli? Recency biases children’s verbal responses

Abstract

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.

The elaboration of exploratory play

“…The first possibility is that increased efficiency in exploration hinges on changes in a child's core capabilities, such as working memory, which increases over the course of childhood (e.g. [73][74][75]). The increase in working memory could directly result in more efficient exploration.…”

Children flexibly compare their confidence within and across perceptual domains.

“…As has been discussed at length elsewhere (Wagenmakers et al, 2018), a Bayes factor (BF) provides the relative weight of the evidence for the null versus the alternative hypothesis, therefore providing the graded strength or reliability for the null hypothesis. A BF 10 of 1 indicates a lack of evidence for either hypothesis, whereas values that increase toward positive infinity indicate increasingly positive evidence for the alternative hypothesis and values that decrease 2 Based on a reviewer's suggestion, we found a slight bias toward higher confidence in the right-hand answer (54%, SD ϭ 0.11, always the second choice; see Sumner, DeAngelis, Hyatt, Goodman, & Kidd, 2019), t(47) ϭ 2.45, p ϭ .018, d ϭ 0.35. It is important to note that this did not differ between the within-and across-domain conditions (53% within, SD ϭ 0.14; 54% across, SD ϭ 0.11), t(47) ϭ 0.72, p ϭ .473, d ϭ 0.10, so we did not include this variable in further analyses.…”

“…Based on a reviewer’s suggestion, we found a slight bias toward higher confidence in the right-hand answer (54%, SD = 0.11, always the second choice; see Sumner, DeAngelis, Hyatt, Goodman, & Kidd, 2019), t (47) = 2.45, p = .018, d = 0.35. It is important to note that this did not differ between the within- and across-domain conditions (53% within, SD = 0.14; 54% across, SD = 0.11), t (47) = 0.72, p = .473, d = 0.10, so we did not include this variable in further analyses.…”

Don’t know responding in young maltreated children: The effects of wh- questions type and enhanced interview instructions.

“…Even very young children understand that yes–no questions call for a yes or a no (Horgan, 1978) and that forced-choice questions ask one to choose one of the proffered options (Sumner et al, 2019), and this understanding likely contributes to high rates of guessing in response to these kinds of questions (Waterman et al, 2000). By the same token, the results suggest that young children’s recognition that questions about color and number call for a color name or a number, coupled with their ability to generate color names and numbers (Wagner et al, 2013), leads to high rates of guessing in response to color/number questions.…”