Children consider a speaker’s information privilege and engage in adaptive selective trust in referential cues

This study examined the circumstances in which children selectively use others' referential cues such as point and gaze. Across two experiments, 173 children (3;0–5;2) were presented with a single informant who provided either accurate or inaccurate referential cues to the location of a hidden object in a context with either information access or a lack of. Children were discriminating in using the referential cues from accurate and inaccurate informants only when the informant had access to information and expressed knowledge with her referential cues (Experiment 1), but not when the informant had no access to information and appeared to be guessing (Experiment 2). This is particularly true for children who could perceive the informant's contextual constraints. Results show that preschoolers adapt their selective trust strategies according to the situation, i.e., a speaker's information privilege, and display a relatively sophisticated representation of sensitivity to and preferential use of speakers' referential cues.