title: Infants track the reliability of potential informants.
abstract: Across two eye-tracking experiments, we showed that infants are sensitive to the statistical reliability of informative cues and selective in their use of information generated by such cues. We familiarized 8-month-olds with faces (Experiment 1) or arrows (Experiment 2) that cued the locations of animated animals with different degrees of reliability. The reliable cue always cued a box containing an animation, whereas the unreliable cue cued a box that contained an animation only 25% of the time. At test, infants searched longer in the boxes that were reliably cued, but did not search longer in the boxes that were unreliably cued. At generalization, when boxes were cued that never contained animations before, only infants in the face experiment followed the reliable cue. These results provide the first evidence that even young infants can track the reliability of potential informants and use this information judiciously to modify their future behavior.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London k.swan@bbk.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Kristen Swan
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Tummeltshammer
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester.
authors.forename: Rachel
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University.
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Sobel
authors.affiliation: Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London.
authors.forename: Natasha Z
authors.initials: NZ
authors.lastname: Kirkham
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D003463:Cues; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception
keywords: cognitive development; learning; social cognition