TY - GEN
T1 - Controlling the message
T2 - 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
AU - Rhodes, Marjorie
AU - Bonawitz, Elizabeth
AU - Shafto, Patrick
AU - Chen, Annie
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by NSF grants BCS-1147543 to Rhodes and DRL-1149116 to Shafto. We thank the Children's Museum of Manhattan for participating in this research.
Funding Information:
This research was supported by NSF grants BCS-1147543 to Rhodes and DRL-1149116 to Shafto. We thank the Children’s Museum of Manhattan for participating in this research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014. All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Effective communication entails the strategic presentation of evidence; good communicators present representative evidence to their listeners-evidence that is both consistent with the concept being communicated and also unlikely to support another concept a listener might consider. The present study examined whether preschool-age children effectively select evidence to manipulate others' semantic knowledge, by testing how children choose evidence in a teaching or deception task. Results indicate that preschoolers indeed effectively select evidence to meet specific communicative goals. When asked to teach others, children selected evidence that effectively spanned the concept of interest and avoided overly restrictive evidence; when asked to deceive others into believing a narrower concept, they selected evidence consistent with the overly restricted belief. Thus, results support the idea that preschool children possess remarkable abilities to select the best evidence to manipulate what others believe.
AB - Effective communication entails the strategic presentation of evidence; good communicators present representative evidence to their listeners-evidence that is both consistent with the concept being communicated and also unlikely to support another concept a listener might consider. The present study examined whether preschool-age children effectively select evidence to manipulate others' semantic knowledge, by testing how children choose evidence in a teaching or deception task. Results indicate that preschoolers indeed effectively select evidence to meet specific communicative goals. When asked to teach others, children selected evidence that effectively spanned the concept of interest and avoided overly restrictive evidence; when asked to deceive others into believing a narrower concept, they selected evidence consistent with the overly restricted belief. Thus, results support the idea that preschool children possess remarkable abilities to select the best evidence to manipulate what others believe.
KW - Cognitive development
KW - evidential reasoning
KW - psychological reasoning
KW - teaching and deception
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139212004&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85139212004&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85139212004
T3 - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
SP - 218
EP - 223
BT - Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
Y2 - 23 July 2014 through 26 July 2014
ER -