Amy, Week 4

At the beginning of the fourth week, I started working on my third project with Charlotte, a PhD student at
the Tomasello Lab. For the first part of the study, the child watched a pre-recorded Skype video in which
three different adult experimenters name three toys (a dog, a book, and a dump truck) in their own ways.
The first two people name them “a fish”, “a spoon”, and “a shoe” respectively, which is obviously wrong.
Then when the third person came and was about to name the toys, there was a buzzing sound in the
video and the experimenter would ask what the child participants expected the third person to say. After
the children answered, the experimenter would take out three toys with different shapes and colors and
let the child play with them for a while. After that, the child would watch another pre-recorded Skype
video in which the first person in the previous video assigned three names to the three toys respectively.
As she left, a new person who did not appear in the first video came and named the three toys with the
three names but in a different way. We were trying to see whether the unreliability of the former person in
the first video would make children more likely to trust the new person in the second video and thus
name the toys the way she did.

For the project, my job was coding the participants’ behaviors, and it was interesting to see how child
participants predicted that the third person would name the objects in a wrong way even though they
know the actual name of the objects. In this case, it was especially surprising to see that the “rules of
naming toys” established by the adult experimenters, authority figures for the child participants, did not
change the children’s own perception, at least for most cases. In addition, they are indeed more likely to
trust the new person and thus named the objects in the same way as the person did because they found
the unreliable source hard to trust.