What do young children understand about arguments? Do they evaluate arguments critically when deciding whom to learn from? To address this question, we investigated children at age 4–5, when robust selective social learning is in place. In Studies 1a/b, children made an initial perceptual judgment regarding the location of an object under varying perceptual circumstances; then received advice by another informant who had better/worse perceptual access than them; and then made their final judgment. The advice by the other informant was sometimes accompanied by utterances of the form “I am certain … because I've seen it”. These utterances thus constituted good arguments in some conditions (informant could see clearly), but not in others (informant had poor perceptual access). Results showed that children evaluated argument quality in context-sensitive ways and used them differentially for belief-revision. They engaged in more belief-revision when the informant gave this argument only when her perceptual condition, and thus her argument, was good. In Study 2, children were asked to find out about different properties (color/texture) of an object, and received conflicting testimony from two informants who supported their claims by utterances of the form “because I've seen it” (good argument regarding color/poor regarding texture) or “because I've felt it” (vice versa). Again, children engaged in context-relative evaluation of argument quality, selectively learning from the agent with the appropriate argument. Taken together, these finding reveal that children from age 4 understand argument quality in sophisticated, context-relative ways, and use this understanding for selective learning and belief-revision.

中文翻译：

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幼儿在形成和修正信念时评估并遵循他人的论点

幼儿对争论的理解是什么？在决定向谁学习时，他们是否批判性地评估论点？为了解决这个问题，我们调查了 4-5 岁的儿童，当时他们已经有了强大的选择性社会学习。在研究 1a/b 中，儿童在不同的感知环境下对物体的位置做出初步的感知判断；然后接受另一位比他们有更好/更差知觉访问的线人的建议；然后做出最后的判断。另一名线人的建议有时伴随着“我确定……因为我已经看过”这样的话语。因此，这些话语在某些情况下构成了很好的论据（线人可以清楚地看到），但在其他情况下则不然（线人的感知能力很差）。结果表明，儿童以上下文敏感的方式评估论点质量，并将它们用于信念修正。当线人仅在她的知觉状况以及她的论点良好时才给出这个论点时，他们进行了更多的信念修正。在研究 2 中，孩子们被要求找出一个物体的不同属性（颜色/质地），并从两名线人那里得到相互矛盾的证词，他们用“因为我见过它”的形式支持他们的说法（关于颜色/质地差）或“因为我感觉到了”（反之亦然）。同样，孩子们对论点质量进行了与上下文相关的评估，有选择地从具有适当论点的代理那里学习。综合起来，