A recent study published in Cognition reveals that children’s ability to use disagreement as a cue to infer ambiguity in communication strengthens significantly between the ages of 7 and 11.
Understanding how children navigate conflicting perspectives is critical in a world where effective communication and collaboration are necessary. The developmental foundations of this ability are not well understood, particularly how children infer ambiguity from disagreements in social scenarios. Jamie Amemiya and colleagues explored this by examining children’s ability to make inferences based on whether two speakers agreed or disagreed on a given interpretation.
Previous research has shown that children use various cues, such as trustworthiness and domain expertise, to resolve disagreements. However, less is known about their ability to infer ambiguity when there is no clear basis to privilege one perspective over another. The researchers focused on this gap.
The first experiment included 52 children from diverse backgrounds. The researchers designed a series of social scenarios where a child character made a statement, followed by two adult observers who either agreed or disagreed on the interpretation of the statement. For example, in one scenario, a child might say something ambiguous like, “My wagon would look better in a new color,” and then two adults would debate whether the child wanted the wagon to be painted.
The participants were asked to infer what the original speaker had said based on whether the adults agreed or disagreed on the interpretation. Each child participated in four stories, with scenarios counterbalanced to minimize potential biases. The researchers were particularly interested in whether the children would infer that the original statement was ambiguous when the adults disagreed, as opposed to when they agreed.
The second experiment expanded the study to include 110 children, with participants randomly assigned to one of two conditions: prediction or inference. In the prediction condition, children were presented with statements that were either unambiguous (e.g., “Please paint my wagon”) or ambiguous (e.g., “My wagon would look better in a new color”) and were asked to predict whether two listeners would agree or disagree on the interpretation of the statement. In the inference condition, similar to Experiment 1, children had to infer whether the original statement was ambiguous or unambiguous based on the observers’ agreement or disagreement.
The results from Experiment 1 revealed a clear developmental trajectory in children’s ability to use disagreement as a cue for inferring ambiguity. Children were more likely to infer an ambiguous statement when the observers disagreed. This effect became more pronounced with age, particularly among children aged 10 and 11, who showed a stronger tendency to recognize that disagreement often signals ambiguity. The findings suggest that younger children may struggle to integrate conflicting perspectives, often choosing one perspective over the other rather than inferring ambiguity.
Experiment 2 replicated these findings and provided further insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying this ability. Children in the prediction condition successfully predicted that ambiguous statements were more likely to lead to disagreement, while unambiguous statements were more likely to lead to agreement. Interestingly, this ability emerged as early as age 7, indicating that children as young as 7 years old can anticipate the likelihood of disagreement based on the nature of a statement.
However, in the inference condition, older children outperformed younger ones, suggesting that while younger children can predict disagreement, they may struggle to apply this knowledge when making inferences about the nature of the original statement.
Bayesian analysis further revealed that age-related improvements in inferential reasoning were not fully explained by prediction abilities alone. Instead, older children were found to be more adept at selecting the utterance that aligned with their posterior beliefs, indicating that improvements in working memory and executive functions might also contribute to their enhanced inferential reasoning.
Overall, the results of these experiments suggest that while the ability to predict when disagreements will arise is critical for making inferences about ambiguity, there are additional cognitive processes that develop with age, enabling older children to make more accurate inferences based on conflicting perspectives.
Notably, younger children’s inferential reasoning might be hindered by a noisier decision-making process, suggesting that reducing the complexity of choices could enhance performance.
The research, “Children use disagreement to infer what happened”, was authored by Jamie Amemiya, Gail D. Heyman, and Tobias Gerstenberg.
