7
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Epistemic trust: modeling children's reasoning about others' knowledge and intent.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          A core assumption of many theories of development is that children can learn indirectly from other people. However, indirect experience (or testimony) is not constrained to provide veridical information. As a result, if children are to capitalize on this source of knowledge, they must be able to infer who is trustworthy and who is not. How might a learner make such inferences while at the same time learning about the world? What biases, if any, might children bring to this problem? We address these questions with a computational model of epistemic trust in which learners reason about the helpfulness and knowledgeability of an informant. We show that the model captures the competencies shown by young children in four areas: (1) using informants' accuracy to infer how much to trust them; (2) using informants' recent accuracy to overcome effects of familiarity; (3) inferring trust based on consensus among informants; and (4) using information about mal-intent to decide not to trust. The model also explains developmental changes in performance between 3 and 4 years of age as a result of changing default assumptions about the helpfulness of other people.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Dev Sci
          Developmental science
          1467-7687
          1363-755X
          May 2012
          : 15
          : 3
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, KY 40292, USA. p.shafto@louisville.edu
          Article
          10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01135.x
          22490183
          dd0e0ab3-d21a-431e-b659-ed243ff3b69b
          © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article