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Spatial perspective taking, in which people mentally adopt another person&#39;s view of the world, is a crucial component of everyday communication. We investigate spatial perspective taking in listeners interpreting ambiguous instructions from a partner, looking at how this behaviour varies with a human vs. computer partner (Exp. 1 and 2), and with individual differences in social and cognitive abilities (Exp. 3). Listeners&#39; perspective taking tendencies vary with their individual differences in spatial orientation ability, with more othercentricism associated with better spatial orientation. In addition, partner identity influences perspective taking; however, in contrast to previous work, we find higher levels of egocentricism with a computer than a human partner.

CogSci 2022

Partner effects and individual differences on perspective taking

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Spatial perspective taking, in which people mentally adopt another person's view of the world, is a crucial component of everyday communication. We investigate spatial perspective taking in listeners interpreting ambiguous instructions from a partner, looking at how this behaviour varies with a human vs. computer partner (Exp. 1 and 2), and with individual differences in social and cognitive abilities (Exp. 3). Listeners' perspective taking tendencies vary with their individual differences in spatial orientation ability, with more othercentricism associated with better spatial orientation. In addition, partner identity influences perspective taking; however, in contrast to previous work, we find higher levels of egocentricism with a computer than a human partner.

technical paper

Causal relationships can generate many different kinds of correlations among variables. However, research on children’s causal reasoning has focused almost exclusively on just one kind of regularity: the temporal covariation between candidate causes and effects, and in particular, the covariation between interventions and outcomes. Here we show that young children recognize more abstract correlations – in the ways that object properties are distributed over sets, or change over time – and constrain their causal hypotheses accordingly. Specifically, we show that children (range: 48-84 months) distinguish candidate causes based on correlations in the distribution of discrete (set size, arity, and proportion) and continuous (mean and mode) properties of sets (Experiment 1), and also within monotonic, quadratic, and periodic functions (Experiment 2).
Keywords: children; causal reasoning; abstract concepts; sets; functions

Preschoolers’ sensitivity to abstract correlations in the properties of sets and functions

Children produce increasingly more recognizable drawings of object concepts throughout childhood. What drives this improvement? Here we explore the role of children's ability to include relevant parts of those objects in their drawings. We crowdsourced part tags for every pen stroke in 2,160 drawings of 16 common object categories that had been produced by children between 4 and 8 years old. These part decompositions revealed both substantial variation in the number and kind of parts that children emphasized, as well as a non-monotonic relationship between the number of parts that children drew and how recognizable their drawing was. We plan to publicly release these data to catalyze further investigation of how children's drawings change across development.

Developmental changes in the semantic part structure of drawn objects

Evaluations of others’ generosity are critical for identifying quality social partners, yet the factors which systematically affect these evaluations and how they vary across development are still relatively unclear. In this work, we propose that two key evaluative dimensions are the cost associated with a giving action and the need of the recipient. In this way, we suggest that information about both the giver and the recipient influences generosity evaluations. Across two sets of studies, we establish that adults’ and children’s third-party evaluations of generosity indeed are sensitive both to the cost and need associated with the action. Variations in cost and need predicted responses across several, distinct manipulations. Further, these effects were observed both in comparative and standalone contexts, suggesting both dimensions are spontaneously invoked in third-party evaluations. Interestingly, children’s responses to cost manipulations were less consistent than to need manipulations, implying cognitive development could contribute to cost understanding.

Not just if, but how much: Children and adults use cost and need to make evaluations about generosity across contexts

This study explored white lie-telling behaviour in 3- to 6-year-old children from three cultural groups: Anglo Canadian (n = 49), Chinese Canadian (n = 45), and Eastern-European Canadian (n = 11). In a video-conferencing setup, a female researcher expressed a misconception about her artwork and asked participants for their opinion, in the presence versus absence of a stated social consequence (i.e., two conditions). Parental measures of collectivism and parenting styles were also collected. The results indicated that the likelihood of children telling a white lie (versus challenging the researcher’s misconception) did not differ significantly across cultural groups or conditions and was not predicted by parental collectivism, authoritativeness, or authoritarianism. However, the effect of authoritativeness on white lie telling did approach significance. These findings are discussed in relation to possible factors that might have accounted for the lack of cultural differences.

What to Do When Someone Expresses a Misconception? A Cross-Cultural Examination of Children’s White Lie-Telling Behaviour

Adults are far better at identifying adult talkers than child talkers (e.g., Cooper et al., 2020). Why is this the case? Are child talkers acoustically less distinguishable (e.g., Lee et al., 1999)? Or perhaps adults better identify adult talkers, while children better identify child talkers (e.g., see Anastasi & Rhodes, 2005, for evidence that an own-age advantage exists in face recognition). Here, we test adults (N=72) and 6.5-year-olds (N=71) on a voice identification task featuring single word recordings by 8 children and 8 adults. While all listeners successfully identified all talkers above chance (ps<.05), adults significantly outperformed children with both adult (Madult=0.66 vs. Mchild=0.54; p<.001) and child talkers (Madult=0.64 vs. Mchild=0.57; p<.05). Thus, we find no evidence of an own-age advantage in talker recognition. Rather, we find additional evidence that adults are more skilled than children in voice identification tasks, suggesting that talker recognitions skills take time to fully mature.

Is there an Own-Age Advantage in Talker Recognition?

Math talk has implications for the development of numerical concepts. Research suggests that when caregivers talk about natural numbers (1, 2, 3…), it may enhance children’s later math knowledge. Natural numbers have physical quantities that children can observe, yet abstract numerical concepts do not have such observable quantities. In this analysis, we examined how zero occurs in math talk. Using the CHILDES American English corpora (MacWhinney, 2000), we examined the frequency and nature of math talk about zero in naturalistic interactions between 2- to 6-year-olds and other speakers. Input from other speakers increased in frequency and complexity across development. Input with zero in symbolic sentential contexts (e.g., “one and zero make ten”) and cardinal sentential contexts (e.g., “zero means nothing”) increased with development. Children’s production of zero did not change in frequency or context. These results have implications for the concepts about zero children may bring to formal education.

Zero in on This: Children are Exposed to Various Concepts of “Zero” Prior to Age Six

Conditionals have multiple interpretations: the statement "If it rains, Abbie will buy an umbrella" is true when it rains and Abbie buys an umbrella (conjunction), when it doesn’t rain and Abbie doesn’t buy an umbrella (biconditional), and when it doesn’t rain and Abbie buys an umbrella (conditional). Prior research shows that children understand all three interpretations in adolescence, but the reasons for this delay remain unclear. For some researchers, children struggle to represent multiple possibilities due to limited resources. For others, task-related factors underlie children’s difficulties. In a truth-value judgement task, 3-10-year-olds matched a conditional statement with one of two pictures: 1 depicting a false interpretation of the conditional vs. one of the 3 true interpretations. Results showed that children understood conjunction since age 3 but comprehended all three conditional interpretations at age 9, earlier than previously thought. Findings point to a task-related explanation of children’s difficulties.

How do young children interpret conditionals?

Effective practice is key to learning. Yet, it is unclear whether
young children have the ability to make effective and adaptive
training choices. In this project, we investigated 4- to 7-year-old
children’s (n=146) ability to tailor their training strategies
to optimize performance outcomes. Children were presented
with one easy and one difficult guessing game and were asked
to choose which game they wanted to practice. Crucially, before
they chose, they were told that they would eventually be
tested either on the game of their choice (Choice condition) or
on the game the computer would randomly pick (Random condition).
Contrary to our hypotheses, we found that condition
per se did not predict children’s training choices. However, we
found that older children were more likely to make effective
and adaptive training choices than younger children. Overall,
our results indicate that children’s training choices improve
from ages 4 to 7 and inform the development of interventions
to support strategic learning.

Developmental changes in children's training strategies

Speakers often use different names to refer to the same entity (e.g., "woman" vs. "tennis player"). We explore factors that affect naming variation for visually presented objects, analyzing a large dataset of object names with realistic images, and focusing on two factors: visual typicality (of objects and contexts) and name frequency. We develop a computational approach to estimate typicality, and not only study object names used by most annotators (top names), but also the second most used ones (alternative names). Our results show that variation increases for objects that are less typical for their top name, more typical for their alternative name, or whose top name has relatively low frequency. Context typicality does not show a general effect. Overall, we show that characteristics relating to name candidates beyond the top name are informative of naming variation, and the potential of using computational methods to inform models of human object naming.

Woman or tennis player? Visual typicality and lexical frequency affect variation in object naming

Research on sound symbolism has shown that speakers of different languages associate specific consonants and vowels with round and pointy shapes, a phenomenon commonly dubbed the bouba-kiki effect. Most of this work rely on forced-choice tasks in which participants assign previously crafted pseudowords (like kiki or bouba) to visual stimuli. Here we investigate this phenomenon with a production written task. Participants had to create a new word they thought would be a good name for round and spiky images. In this less constrained task, spiky images received names with more high/front vowels and voiceless stops, while round shapes were named with more back/rounded vowels and lateral and nasal consonants. In great part these results replicate previous findings, showing that participants recourse to sound symbolism even when the task at hand gives them more freedom to create names to abstract shapes.

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Preschoolers’ sensitivity to abstract correlations in the properties of sets and functions

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