Parameterizing developmental changes in epistemic trust

Baxter S. Eaves, Patrick Shafto

Children rely on others for much of what they learn, and therefore must track who to trust for information. Researchers have debated whether to interpret children's behavior as inferences about informants' knowledgeability only or as inferences about both knowledgeability and intent. We introduce a novel framework for integrating results across heterogeneous ages and methods. The framework allows application of a recent computational model to a set of results that span ages 8 months to adulthood and a variety of methods. The results show strong fits to specific findings in the literature trust, and correctly fails to fit one representative result from an adjacent literature. In the aggregate, the results show a clear development in children's reasoning about informants' intent and no appreciable changes in reasoning about informants' knowledgeability, confirming previous results. The results extend previous findings by modeling development over a much wider age range and identifying and explaining differences across methods.