Abstract: Children have powerful cognitive capacities that enable efficient social learning, but also acquire many beliefs that are false or over-generalized. The present talk proposes that this is partly because, although even young children distinguish between knowledgeable and ignorant sources, they do not always successfully integrate and preserve this epistemic information in memory in ways that appropriately constrain subsequent belief and generalization. Part 1 reveals that whereas young children can appropriately privilege an expert’s testimony over a novice’s, they later misremember the novice’s claim as true, in part because limitations in executive function impede their ability to store rejections of the novice’s initial claim. Part 2 examines how these limitations shape children’s learning from generic statements about categories (e.g., “Birds fly”). Whereas older children and adults draw broad conclusions from such statements selectively, depending on whether a speaker is knowledgeable about the category, younger children do so even when they know the speaker has no basis for the generalization. Part 3 considers why these over-generalized representations may be particularly persistent: Both children and adults show a systematic bias to misremember information about category members as generic, making it especially challenging to learn category information in ways that remain appropriately constrained to individuals or subsets. Together, these findings suggest that a central challenge of social learning is preserving epistemic and linguistic information that should constrain later beliefs and generalizations. Developmental changes in these capacities may therefore help explain when social learning produces accurate knowledge and when it instead produces false or over-generalized beliefs.
Bio: Dr. Marjorie Rhodes
Marjorie Rhodes is a Professor of Psychology and Affiliated Faculty in Linguistics at New York University. Her research uses experimental, computational, and field-based approaches to study conceptual and social-cognitive development, particularly how language and basic cognitive processes interact to shape children’s representations of the social world. Rhodes is President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and her work has been recognized by the Stanton Prize for interdisciplinary contributions to psychology and philosophy, as well as early career awards from the Cognitive Development Society and the Developmental Division of the American Psychological Association.