Children require more evidence to revise beliefs under gradual perceptual change

Abstract

Rafetseder et al. (2021) were the first to demonstrate that children have difficulty revising their beliefs when objects morphed from one object (e.g. a rabbit) into another (e.g. a duck). Children aged four to eight reported the second object significantly later than adults. This is surprising, because both children and adults were presented with the same initial information (“it is a rabbit”) and were exposed to the same contradictory visual evidence. We conducted three experiments to replicate the results and to and explore reasons for children’s delayed belief revision. In Experiment 1 (N = 58; 3- to 6-year-olds), we demonstrated that children only struggle to identify the second object in the gradual condition, while displaying adult-like categorical perception when the same images were presented individually outside of the morphing context. In Experiment 2 (N = 86; 6- to 11-year-olds), we found that only children aged 9 years and over showed a similar pattern to adults, and that a global processing style facilitated identification of the second object. In Experiment 3 (N = 47, 5- to 6-year-olds), when children were explicitly informed of the two possible interpretations of the morphed images, their performance improved, although not to the level observed in the individual condition of Experiment 1. These findings suggest that children of different ages struggle to revise their beliefs in a gradually changing environment for different reasons. While older children may use less efficient, potentially local, exploration strategies, younger children may have difficulties with mental imagery.