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. 2020 Sep;23(5):e12938.
doi: 10.1111/desc.12938. Epub 2020 Feb 26.

"I don't know but I know who to ask": 12-month-olds actively seek information from knowledgeable adults

Marina Bazhydai  1 , Gert Westermann  1 , Eugenio Parise  1
Affiliations

"I don't know but I know who to ask": 12-month-olds actively seek information from knowledgeable adults

Marina Bazhydai et al. Dev Sci. 2020 Sep.

Abstract

Active social communication is an effective way for infants to learn about the world. Do pre-verbal and pre-pointing infants seek epistemic information from their social partners when motivated to obtain information they cannot discover independently? The present study investigated whether 12-month-olds (N = 30) selectively seek information from knowledgeable adults in situations of referential uncertainty. In a live experiment, infants were introduced to two unfamiliar adults, an Informant (reliably labeling objects) and a Non-Informant (equally socially engaging, but ignorant about object labels). At test, infants were asked to make an impossible choice-locate a novel referent among two novel objects. When facing epistemic uncertainty-but not at other phases of the procedure-infants selectively referred to the Informant rather than the Non-Informant. These results show that pre-verbal infants use social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/23dLPsa-fAY.

Keywords: active social learning; epistemic knowledge; information seeking; knowledge transmission; referential uncertainty; social referencing.

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References

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