The psychological mechanisms underlying infants' selective social learning are currently a subject of controversy. The main goal of the present study was to contribute data to this debate by investigating whether domain-specific or domain-general abilities guide infants' selectivity. Eighteen-month-olds observed a reliable and an unreliable speaker, and then completed a forced-choice word learning paradigm, two theory of mind tasks, and an associative learning task. Results revealed that infants showed sensitivity to the verbal competence of the speaker. Additionally, infants with superior knowledge inference abilities were less likely to learn from the unreliable speaker. No link was observed between selective social learning and associative learning skills. These results replicate and extend previous findings demonstrating that socio-cognitive abilities are linked to infants' selective social learning.

中文翻译：

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明确婴儿的心理理论、联想学习和选择性信任之间的联系

婴儿选择性社会学习的心理机制目前是一个有争议的话题。本研究的主要目标是通过调查特定领域或领域通用能力是否指导婴儿的选择性，为这场辩论提供数据。十八个月大的孩子观察一个可靠和一个不可靠的说话者，然后完成一个强制选择单词学习范式、两个心理任务理论和一个联想学习任务。结果显示，婴儿对说话者的语言能力表现出敏感性。此外，具有卓越知识推理能力的婴儿不太可能从不可靠的说话者那里学习。在选择性社交学习和联想学习技能之间没有观察到任何联系。