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Research Findings: Although work across developmental and educational psychology reveals that trust impacts children’s acceptance of claims and that teacher-student relationships impact learning ou...

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false-belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false-belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false-belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true-belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true- and false-belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true-belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true-belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4-7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English-speakers. Children were recruited from university-sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. In Chapter III, minor alterations in task procedures produced wide variations in children's performance in 3-option false-belief tasks. In Chapter IV, we report findings which show that the developmental lag between children's understanding ignorance and understanding false belief is longer than the lag reported in previous studies. In Chapter V, children did not distinguish between agents who have false beliefs versus agents who have no beliefs. In Chapter VI, findings showed that children found it no easier to reason about true beliefs than to reason about false beliefs. In Chapter VII, when children were asked to justify their correct answers in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents' false beliefs. Similarly, in Chapter VIII, when children were asked to explain agents' actions in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents' false beliefs. In Chapter IX, children who were identified as using PAR differed from children who understood beliefs along three dimensions-in levels of social development, inhibitory control, and kindergarten adjustment. Although the findings need replication and additional studies of alternative interpretations, the collection of results reported in this monograph challenges the prevailing view that representational ToM is in place by the end of the preschool years. Furthermore, the pattern of findings is consistent with the proposal that PAR is the developmental precursor of representational ToM. The current findings also raise questions about claims that infants and toddlers demonstrate ToM-related abilities, and that representational ToM is innate.

Parents and educators commonly seek to influence children's behavior by providing them with practical incentives, but how should we understand the influence of such incentives on children's beliefs? Are children capable of distinguishing between speech acts that provide practical reasons for believing, such as requests and offers, from speech acts that provide straightforward epistemic reasons, such as simple acts of telling? To investigate these questions, we randomly assigned 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 97) to one of two conditions (Request or Offer) in which two speakers each commented on a series of four exotic animals. In each condition, an agent who stated what an object was called with a simple telling ("This is a tanzer") was contrasted with an agent who made either a doxastic request ("I want you to think that this is a tanzer") or a doxastic offer ("If you think that this is a tanzer, I'll let you play with this new toy"). We then measured children's endorsement of and semantic memory for the claims as well as their knowledge attributions and resource allocation decisions. Our results suggest that children appreciate the epistemic reasons inherent in acts of telling when contrasted with doxastic requests, as evidenced by their general preference to learn from, attribute knowledge to, and share with the teller in the Request condition. When tellings were contrasted with doxastic offers, children were less systematic in their preferences. We discuss various interpretations of this finding and offer suggestions for future research.

Much of early learning depends on others, and the transmission of testimony presents children with a range of opportunities to learn about and from other people. Much work has focused on children's ability to select or prefer particular sources of information based on various epistemic (e.g. accuracy, reliability, perceptual access, expertise) and moral (e.g. benevolence, group membership, honesty) characteristics. Understanding the mechanisms by which such selective preferences emerge has been couched primarily in frameworks that treat testimony as a source of inductive evidence, and that treat children's trust as an evidence-based inference. However, there are other distinct interpersonal considerations that support children's trust towards others, considerations that influence who children learn from as well as other practical decisions. Broadening our conception of trust and considering the interpersonal reasons we have to trust others can both strengthen our current understanding of the role that trust plays in children's learning and practical decisions as well as provide a more holistic picture of how children participate in a shared reality with their family, peers, and communities.

We extend Tomasello's discussion of children's developing sense of obligation to testimonial learning. First, we review a battery of behaviors in testimonial exchanges that parallel those described by Tomasello. Second, we explore the variable ways in which children hold others accountable, suggestive that children's evaluations of moral and epistemic responsibilities in joint collaborative activities are distinct.

Organized activities have been found to provide positive experiences for Latino adolescents to develop confidence and learn critical life skills; however, these programs are sometimes a context where youth encounter negative experiences related to ethnic/racial microaggressions (ERMs). This qualitative study explores the types of ERMs that Mexican-origin parents and adolescents encountered in their organized activities experience. Parents were mainly concerned about SB-1070 and the associated law enforcement practices that posed a threat to transporting their children to and from the organized activity site. Adolescents reported that they encountered overt (e.g., ethnic teasing) as well as covert forms of discriminatory behavior (e.g., implicit ethnic stereotypes) from peers and adult leaders. Attention to the processes of ERM is critical to helping practitioners promote positive intergroup relations so that more Latinos will participate and stay active in organized activities.

Human testimony is a rich source of knowledge about the world, enabling us to acquire information about things both near and distant, available and unavailable, known and unknown. It also provides us with an opportunity to investigate children’s reasoning about the human informants who testify. In this chapter, we discuss the testimonial reasoning that supports children’s knowledge acquisition. We discuss both the evidential reasons (e.g., epistemic reliability) that children have to believe what they are told and the distinct interpersonal reasons (e.g., direct address) that children have to trust others. We suggest that children engage in a flexible reasoning process that recruits children’s understanding of intentional agency, one that empowers them to monitor epistemic and moral transgressions, but also to forgive excusable errors. We offer insight into new avenues for future research, with an interest in better specifying the reasoning that children apply to testimony, and the implications this has for understanding individual and cultural differences in testimonial learning.

Keeping commitments to others can be difficult, and we know that people sometimes fail to keep them. How does a speaker's ability to keep commitments affect children's practical decisions to trust and their epistemic decisions to learn? An amassing body of research documents children's trust in testimonial learning decisions, which can be moved in the face of epistemic and moral evidence about an agent. However, other bases for trust go largely unexplored in this literature, such as interpersonal reasons to trust. Here, we investigated how direct bids for interpersonal trust in the form of making commitments, or obligations to the listener, influence a range of decisions toward that agent. We found that 3- and 4-year-olds' (N = 75) practical decisions to wait and to share were moved as a function of a person's commitment-keeping ability, but epistemic decisions to learn were not. Keeping one's commitments may provide children with interpersonal reasons to trust, reasons that may function in ways distinct from the considerations that bear on accepting a claim.