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1. Children use artifacts to infer others' shared interests

   Pesowski, M.L.; Kelemen, D.; Schachner, A. (July 2021, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Fitch, T.; Lamm, C.; Leder, H.; Teßmar-Raible, K. (Ed.)

   Artifacts – the objects we own, make, and choose – provide a source of rich social information. Adults use people’s artifacts to judge others’ traits, interests, and social affiliations. Here we show that 4-year-old children (N=32) infer others’ shared interests from their artifacts. When asked who had the same interests as a target character, children chose the character with a conceptually similar object to the target’s – an object used for the same activity – over a character with a perceptually similar object. When asked which person had the same arbitrary property (bedtime, birthday, or middle name), children did not systematically select either character, and most often reported that they did not know. Adults (N=32) made similar inferences, but differed in their tendency to use artifacts to infer friendships. Overall, by age 4, children show a sophisticated ability to make selective, warranted inferences about others’ interests based solely on their artifacts. 

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2. Children use polysemy to structure new word meanings

   Srinivasan, Mahesh; Berner, Catherine; Rabagliati, Hugh (April 2018, Journal of experimental psychology. General)

   It is well-known that children rapidly learn words, following a range of heuristics. What is less well appreciated is that – because most words are polysemous and have multiple meanings (e.g., ‘glass’ can label a material and drinking vessel) – children will often be learning a new meaning for a known word, rather than an entirely new word. Across four experiments we show that children flexibly adapt a well-known heuristic – the shape bias – when learning polysemous words. Consistent with previous studies, we find that children and adults preferentially extend a new object label to other objects of the same shape. But we also find that when a new word for an object (‘a gup’) has previously been used to label the material composing that object (‘some gup’), children and adults override the shape bias, and are more likely to extend the object label by material (Experiments 1 and 3). Further, we find that, just as an older meaning of a polysemous word constrains interpretations of a new word meaning, encountering a new word meaning leads learners to update their interpretations of an older meaning (Experiment 2). Finally, we find that these effects only arise when learners can perceive that a word’s meanings are related, not when they are arbitrarily paired (Experiment 4). Together, these findings show that children can exploit cues from polysemy to infer how new word meanings should be extended, suggesting that polysemy may facilitate word learning and invite children to construe categories in new ways. 

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3. Age‐related changes in information‐seeking behavior about morally relevant events

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14200  

   Yonas, Daniel; Solomon, Larisa_Heiphetz (November 2024, Child Development)

   Abstract With age, people increasingly emphasize intent when judging transgressions. However, people often lack information about intent in everyday settings; further, they may wonder about reasons underlying pro‐social acts. Three studies investigated 4‐to‐6‐year‐olds', 7‐to‐9‐year‐olds', and adults' (data collected 2020–2022 in the northeastern United States, totaln = 669, ~50% female, predominantly White) desire for information about why behaviors occurred. In Study 1, older children and adults exhibited more curiosity about transgressions versus pro‐social behaviors (ds = 0.52–0.63). Younger children showed weaker preferences to learn about transgressions versus pro‐social behaviors than did older participants (d = 0.12). Older children's emphasis on intent, but not expectation violations, drove age‐related differences (Studies 2–3). Older children may target intent‐related judgments specifically toward transgressions, and doing so may underlie curiosity about wrongdoing. 

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4. Social-Structure Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420924481  

   Gershman, Samuel J.; Cikara, Mina (October 2020, Current Directions in Psychological Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Social-structure learning is the process by which social groups are identified on the basis of experience. Building on models of structure learning in other domains, we formalize this problem within a Bayesian framework. According to this framework, the probabilistic assignment of individuals to groups is computed by combining information about individuals with prior beliefs about group structure. Experiments with adults and children provide support for this framework, ruling out alternative accounts based on dyadic similarity. More broadly, we highlight the implications of social-structure learning for intergroup cognition, stereotype updating, and coalition formation. 

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5. Can Invalid Information Be Ignored When It Is Detected?

   https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241231571  

   Ramsey, Adam_T; Liu, Yanjun; Trueblood, Jennifer_S (March 2024, Psychological Science)

   With the rapid spread of information via social media, individuals are prone to misinformation exposure that they may utilize when forming beliefs. Over five experiments (total N = 815 adults, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States), we investigated whether people could ignore quantitative information when they judged for themselves that it was misreported. Participants recruited online viewed sets of values sampled from Gaussian distributions to estimate the underlying means. They attempted to ignore invalid information, which were outlier values inserted into the value sequences. Results indicated participants were able to detect outliers. Nevertheless, participants’ estimates were still biased in the direction of the outlier, even when they were most certain that they detected invalid information. The addition of visual warning cues and different task scenarios did not fully eliminate systematic over- and underestimation. These findings suggest that individuals may incorporate invalid information they meant to ignore when forming beliefs. 

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