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Preschoolers' Evaluations of Ignorant Agents are Situation-Specific

Publication ,  Conference
Varhol, AR; Kushnir, T; Koenig, MA
Published in: Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
January 1, 2019

Preschool children's preference for knowledgeable agents over ignorant and inaccurate agents (Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001; Koenig & Harris, 2005; Rakoczy et al., 2015), is generally interpreted as epistemic vigilance. However, Kushnir and Koenig (2017) recently found that without a contrasting accurate agent, preschoolers will learn new information from an agent who professed ignorance, but not from one who was inaccurate. Employing a two-speaker design contrasting an agent who professed ignorance about familiar object labels with a speaker whose knowledge state was not revealed, we found that preschoolers (N = 41; 3.50-4.89 years, M = 4.08 years) avoided requesting and endorsing novel information from the ignorant agent in the same domain as her previous ignorance (i.e., labels). In different domains, however, (i.e. novel function learning, resource sharing, etc.) they were at chance in choosing the ignorant agent. This suggests that preschoolers' view of ignorance is situational, rather than uniformly negative.

Duke Scholars

Published In

Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019

ISBN

9780991196777

Publication Date

January 1, 2019

Start / End Page

3022 / 3028
 

Citation

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Varhol, A. R., Kushnir, T., & Koenig, M. A. (2019). Preschoolers' Evaluations of Ignorant Agents are Situation-Specific. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019 (pp. 3022–3028).
Varhol, A. R., T. Kushnir, and M. A. Koenig. “Preschoolers' Evaluations of Ignorant Agents are Situation-Specific.” In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019, 3022–28, 2019.
Varhol AR, Kushnir T, Koenig MA. Preschoolers' Evaluations of Ignorant Agents are Situation-Specific. In: Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019. 2019. p. 3022–8.
Varhol, A. R., et al. “Preschoolers' Evaluations of Ignorant Agents are Situation-Specific.” Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019, 2019, pp. 3022–28.
Varhol AR, Kushnir T, Koenig MA. Preschoolers' Evaluations of Ignorant Agents are Situation-Specific. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019. 2019. p. 3022–3028.

Published In

Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019

ISBN

9780991196777

Publication Date

January 1, 2019

Start / End Page

3022 / 3028