"I don't know but I know who to ask": 12-month-olds actively seek information from knowledgeable adults.

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 9814574 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1467-7687 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 1363755X NLM ISO Abbreviation: Dev Sci Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: Oxford, UK ; Malden, MA, USA : Wiley-Blackwell, c1998-

Information Seeking Behavior* ; Knowledge* ; Learning*; Adult ; Choice Behavior ; Female ; Humans ; Infant ; Male ; Motivation ; Uncertainty

Active social communication is an effective way for infants to learn about the world. Do pre-verbal and pre-pointing infants seek epistemic information from their social partners when motivated to obtain information they cannot discover independently? The present study investigated whether 12-month-olds (N = 30) selectively seek information from knowledgeable adults in situations of referential uncertainty. In a live experiment, infants were introduced to two unfamiliar adults, an Informant (reliably labeling objects) and a Non-Informant (equally socially engaging, but ignorant about object labels). At test, infants were asked to make an impossible choice-locate a novel referent among two novel objects. When facing epistemic uncertainty-but not at other phases of the procedure-infants selectively referred to the Informant rather than the Non-Informant. These results show that pre-verbal infants use social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/23dLPsa-fAY.
(© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

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DS-2014-14 International Leverhulme Trust; ES/L008955/1 International ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD)

Keywords: active social learning; epistemic knowledge; information seeking; knowledge transmission; referential uncertainty; social referencing

Date Created: 20200119 Date Completed: 20200922 Latest Revision: 20200922

20231215

10.1111/desc.12938

31954092