Do children interpret informants' confidence as person-specific or situational?

Abstract

Children prefer to learn from confident rather than hesitant informants. However, it is unclear how children interpret confidence cues: these could be construed as strictly situational indicators of an informant's current certainty about the information they are conveying, or alternatively as person-specific indicators of how "knowledgeable" someone is across situations. In three studies, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 1: N = 51, Experiment 3: N = 41) and 2- and 3-year-olds (Experiment 2: N = 80) saw informants differing in confidence. Each informant's confidence cues either remained constant throughout the experiment, changed between the history and test phases, or were present during the history but not test phase. Results suggest that 4- and 5-year-olds primarily treat confidence cues as situational, whereas there is uncertainty around younger preschoolers' interpretation due to low performance.

Fig 1. Experiment 2, Part 2.

Pictures of the trays with familiar (left) and unfamiliar objects (right).

Fig 2. Experiment 2, Part 2.

Time spent playing with familiar objects (top) and novel objects (bottom) as a function of the type of object (shown toys vs. distractors) and model confidence. Error bars represent standard errors.