The cognitive underpinnings and early development of children’s selective trust

Much research has demonstrated preschoolers’ selective trust in reliable over unreliable sources, but it is debated what cognitive underpinnings mediate this selectivity (low-level attentional biases or higher-level trait ascriptions) and whether children younger than 3 years show selective trust in reliable over unreliable speakers. To address these issues, we adapted a version of the standard two-informant test for younger children and tested 2- and 5-year-olds in the same paradigm, using both eye-tracking and interactive measures. Thus, we could examine whether children’s selective trust was predicted by an attentional bias to the more reliable speaker and whether toddlers, like preschoolers, selectively endorse the contested information provided by the more reliable source. Our findings suggest that children’s selective learning of novel labels is not based on inattention towards the information provided by unreliable source, but rather on the selective encoding and consolidation of the semantic information provided by a more reliable source. Whereas 5-year-olds demonstrated selective trust across a range of tasks and measures, 2-year-olds showed no evidence of selectively learning novel labels from the more reliable source. If the two speakers provided conflicting information, toddlers performed at chance level, rather than selectively endorsing the information by the more reliable source. However, in a follow-up study that presented the same word-learning demands, but no need to consider the speakers’ respective reliability, 2-year-olds showed successful learning of novel labels. Thus, toddlers seemed to have struggled with making person-specific attribution of reliability rather than with the tasks’ word learning demands.