The development of mental imagery

A one-year project funded by ESRC: RES-000-22-4158

Co-investigators:

Dr Marina Wimmer (Principal Investigator)

Martin Doherty, Stirling University

Children’s handling of uncertainty: The influence of an unknown reality

A three-year project funded by ESRC: RES-062-23-0335. Start date January 2007.

Children’s responses to uncertainty depend on the point in time at which the response is made (Robinson, Rowley, Beck et al., 2006). When an imaginary pet was going to occupy one of two boxes, but it was as yet undetermined which one, 70% of 5- to 6-year olds sensibly prepared both to make sure the pet, when it arrived, would not get cold or hungry. In contrast, when children knew the pet was already hidden inside one of the boxes, but did not know which one, only 40% did so. The remainder prepared only one box, risking the pet’s discomfort had they guessed wrongly. The same pattern appeared when 4- to 6-year-olds had to catch a building block which could fall from one of two doors: children were more likely to cover both possibilities when it was as yet undetermined which door the block would fall from, than when a block was already hidden behind one door. In the latter case children frequently guessed, risking missing the block. In this ongoing project we are examining this effect in more detail, trying to explain it, and exploring wider implications.

Co-investigators:

Dr Sarah Beck, University of Birmingham: S.R.Beck@bham.ac.uk

Dr Martin Rowley, Keele University: M.G.Rowley@keele.ac.uk

Research Fellows:

Jamie Pendle (until Sept 30th 2007);

Dr Kerry McColgan (from Nov 1st 2007)

Dr Adam Harris (until project end, March 31st 2010) adam.harris@ucl.ac.uk

Related Publications:

Beck, S.R., Robinson, E.J., Carroll, D.J. & Apperly, I.A. (2006). Children’s thinking about counterfactuals and future hypotheticals as possibilities. Child Development. 77, 413-426.

Robinson, E.J., Rowley, M.G., Beck, S.R., Carroll, D.J., & Apperly, A.I. (2006) Chlidren’s sensitivity to their own relative ignorance: Handling of possibilities under epistemic and physical uncertainty. Child Development, 77, 1642-1655.

Robinson, E.J., Pendle, J.E., Rowley, M.G., Beck,S.R., & McColgan, K.L.T. (2009) Guessing imagined and live chance events: Adults behave like children with live events. British Journal of Psychology., 100, 645-659. 

Learning from Others: Children’s Understanding of the Transfer of Knowledge between Minds.

Much of our knowledge about the world is gained indirectly from what others tell us, rather than from our own direct access. The ability to learn from others confers great advantages over animals without language, but has associated risks: people can deliberately deceive us, be mistaken, or be misunderstood. If we are to benefit overall from gaining knowledge from other people’s assertions, we need to manage these risks. Ideally, we would believe what others tell us only when it is true. From a developmental perspective, this suggests that as children’s increasing mastery of language confers greater and greater ability to benefit from others’ knowledge and experience, they need supporting skills to assess the likely truth of what they are told. Without such skills they will be vulnerable to believing what is false or disbelieving what is true even if surrounded by people who intend to be cooperative and informative.

In a recently completed project funded by ESRC [RES-000-22-1847], we identified the conditions under which young children expect a previously inaccurate speaker to continue to be inaccurate in the future (thereby taking the risk of rejecting a future truthful utterance), and the conditions under which they excuse a speaker’s inaccuracy and expect her to be reliable in the future (thereby taking the risk of accepting a future false utterance).

In ongoing studies with Steve Butterfill we are extending this research to examine the conditions under which young children ask questions. When do they deliberately extract knowledge from somebody else’s mind in order to gain it themselves? Do they show appropriate sensitivity to their potential informant’s knowledge state?

Further ongoing work in collaboration with Shiri Einav investigates children’s sensitivity to other variables that indicate an informant’s likely reliability.

Co- investigators

Dr Erika Nurmsoo, Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol nurmsoo@aya.yale.edu

Dr Steve Butterfill, Dept of Philosophy, Warwick University s.butterfill@warwick.ac.uk

Dr Shiri Einav, Dept of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University seinav@brookes.ac.uk

Related Publications

Robinson, E.J., Haigh, S.N. & Nurmsoo, E. (2008) Children's working understanding of knowledge sources: Confidence in knowledge gained from testimony. Cognitive Development, 23, 105-118.

Nurmsoo, E., & Robinson, E.J. (2008) Identifying unreliable informants: Do children excuse past inaccuracy? Developmental Science, 11, 905-911.

Nurmsoo, E. & Robinson, E.J. (2009) Children's trust in previously inaccurate informants who were well or poorly-informed: When past errors can be excused. Child Development, 80, 23-27.

Robinson, E.J. & Nurmsoo, E (2009) When do children learn from unreliable speakers? Cognitive Development, 24, 16-22

Einav, S. & Robinson, E.J. Children's sensitivity to error magniture when evaluating informants. Cognitive Development, in press, April 2010