We investigated children's information seeking in response to a surprising claim (Study 1, N = 109, 54 Female, Range = 4.02-6.94 years, 49% White, 21% Mixed Ethnicity, 19% Southeast Asian, infStudy 2, N = 154, 74 Female, Range = 4.09-7.99, 50% White, 20% Mixed Ethnicity, 17% Southeast Asian, September 2020-December 2020). Relative to younger…

We examined differences among children in their endorsement of an adult's claim, their subsequent empirical investigation of that claim, and their resolution of any potential conflict between the claim and their empirical investigation. American and Chinese preschool (N = 171, M = 4.71 years) and elementary school (N = 128, M = 7.59 years)…

Recent work has probed the developmental mechanisms that promote fair sharing. This work investigated 2.5- to 5.5-year-olds' (N = 316; 52% female; 79% White; data collected 2016-2018) sharing behavior in relation to three cognitive correlates: number knowledge, working memory, and cognitive control. In contrast to working memory and cognitive…

When presented with a claim that contradicts their intuitions, do children seize opportunities to empirically verify such claims or do they simply acquiesce to what they have been told? To answer this question, we conducted a replication of Ronfard et al. (conducted in the People's Republic of China) in two countries with distinct religious and…

When learning about the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena such as germs or religious phenomena such as God, children are receptive to the testimony of other people. Research in Western cultures has shown that by 5 to 6 years of age, children--like adults--are confident about the existence of both scientific and religious phenomena. We…

Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an "insufficient motivation hypothesis" and an "insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis." With…

Although children often believe an adult's claims, they may have opportunities to check these claims by gathering relevant empirical evidence themselves. Here, we examine whether children seize such opportunities, especially when the claim is counterintuitive. Chinese preschool and elementary schoolchildren were presented with five different-sized…

Young children share fairly and expect others to do the same. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support fairness. We investigated whether children's numerical competencies are linked with their sharing behavior. Preschoolers (aged 2.5-5.5) participated in third-party resource allocation tasks in which they split a…

Human culture relies on extensive use of social transmission, which must be integrated with independently acquired (i.e. asocial) information for effective decision-making. Formal evolutionary theory predicts that natural selection should favor adaptive learning strategies, including a bias to copy when uncertain, and a bias to disproportionately…

Children can identify owners either by seeing a person in possession of an object (a visual cue) and inferring that they are the owner or by hearing testimony about a claim of ownership (a verbal cue). A total of 391 children between 2.5 and 6 years of age were tested in three experiments assessing how children identify owners when these two cues…

Although often conceptualized in contradictory terms, the common assumption that natural and supernatural explanations are incompatible is psychologically inaccurate. Instead, there is considerable evidence that the same individuals use both natural and supernatural explanations to interpret the very same events and that there are multiple ways in…

Children prefer to learn from informants in consensus with one another. However, no research has examined whether this preference exists across cultures, and whether the race of the informants impacts that preference. In 2 studies, one hundred thirty-six 4- to 7-year-old European American and Taiwanese children demonstrated a systematic preference…

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the…

An understanding of ownership entails the recognition that ownership can be transferred permanently and the ability to differentiate legitimate from illegitimate transfers. Two experiments explored the development of this understanding in 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-year olds, using stories about gift-giving and stealing. The possibility that children use…

This research examined the ability of young (N = 96) children to learn about a change in the location of a hidden object, either via an adult's verbal testimony or from direct observation. Thirty-month-olds searched with equal accuracy whether they were told about the change or directly observed it. By contrast, when 23-month-olds were told about…