Kushnir Tamar, Koenig Melissa A
Department of Human Development, Cornell University.
Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota.
Dev Psychol. 2017 May;53(5):826-835. doi: 10.1037/dev0000294. Epub 2017 Mar 30.
Testimony is a valuable source of information for young learners, in particular if children maintain vigilance against errors while still being open to learning from imperfectly knowledgeable sources. We find support for this idea by examining how children evaluate individual speakers who present very different epistemic risks by being previously ignorant or inaccurate. Results across 2 experiments show that children attribute knowledge to (Experiment 1) and endorse new claims made by speakers (Experiment 2) who previously professed ignorance about familiar object labels, but not to speakers whose labels were previously inaccurate. Study 2 further clarifies that children are not simply relying on links between informational access and knowledge; children rejected testimony from a previously inaccurate speaker even when she had perceptual access to support her claim. These results show that children actively monitor the reliability of a speaker's knowledge claims, distinguish unreliable speakers from those who sometimes admit ignorance, raising new questions about how such admissions factor in to children's appraisal of the scope and limits of a person's knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record
对于年幼的学习者来说，证词是一种宝贵的信息来源，特别是当孩子们在对知识不全面的来源保持开放学习态度的同时，还能对错误保持警惕时。通过研究孩子们如何评估那些因先前无知或不准确而呈现出非常不同认知风险的个体发言者，我们找到了对这一观点的支持。两项实验的结果表明，孩子们会将知识归于（实验1）并认可那些先前表示对熟悉物体标签无知的发言者提出的新主张（实验2），但不会归于那些先前标签不准确的发言者。研究2进一步阐明，孩子们并非仅仅依赖信息获取与知识之间的联系；即使先前不准确的发言者有感知信息来支持她的主张，孩子们也会拒绝其证词。这些结果表明，孩子们会积极监控发言者知识主张的可靠性，将不可靠的发言者与那些有时承认无知的发言者区分开来，这就引发了关于这种承认如何影响孩子们对一个人知识范围和局限性的评估的新问题。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
