The most important skill for children in such a situation is the ability to discern the reliability of these sources and thus develop critical thinking.
Researchers from the National University of Singapore concluded that children trusted an unreliable human informant more than an unreliable robot informant. However, this was just one of the observations.
The team was led by Dr. Li Xiaoqian and her academic advisor, Professor You Weiqun. Together with her team, they discovered that “children do not just trust those who label them; they trust those who could be relied upon in the past.” According to the researchers, this selectivity in social learning reflects the development of young children’s understanding of what constitutes a reliable source of information.
“The question is how young children use their intelligence to decide when to learn and whom to trust,” noted Li Xiaoqian.
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The team involved preschool children from Singaporean institutions such as ChildFirst, Red SchoolHouse, and Safari House in the study. The average age of the participants was 4.58 years, which became the cutoff for dividing the children into younger and older groups.
Participants were alternately asked to interact either with a person or with an information robot (a humanoid robot with a human-like but robotic voice). These informants provided either accurate or inaccurate definitions of various objects.
To measure the level of children’s trust, researchers observed how children perceive new information from these informants, writes Earth .
What the team learned.
The results showed that children trusted informants – people or robots from whom they had previously received accurate information. However, they were hesitant to trust those informants who had provided inaccurate information in the past, especially if the informant was a robot.
Moreover, younger children were more likely to trust an unreliable person than an unreliable robot. In contrast, older children tended to distrust unreliable informants, whether they were AI or human.
“These results show that younger and older children may have different strategies for electoral trust, particularly regarding how they use the reliability of informants and identity signals when deciding whom to trust,” commented Dr. Li Xiaoqian.
According to her, as children grow older, they increasingly rely on signals of reliability to determine their trusting behavior.
Previous research has shown that in assessing the reliability of an informant, children take into account various factors such as age, familiarity, and speech. Younger children tend to pay more attention to identity cues, while older children focus more on the content of the information.
This research is important because its authors observed how children perceive information from robots and humans. They also studied how trustful behavior develops in young children.
Understanding these issues will provide a unique perspective on the development of trust and social learning among children growing up alongside various sources of information, including artificial intelligence, noted Professor You Wei Quin.
The results of the study were published in the journal Child Development.