Some philosophers argue that reflection, the ability to assess one’s reasons for beliefs and actions, is the defining feature of rational thinking. However, they also tie reflective thinking to linguistic abilities, excluding human infants and non-human animals. To assess capacities for basic reflective thinking, without linguistic requirements, we investigated whether 2-year-old children, dogs, or pigs could identify information coming from an unreliable informant as misleading. In an object-search task, one informant’s actions reliably indicated the location of a reward, while another informants actions were unreliable, indicating the reward location in 50% of trials. The informants used three different actions to hide rewards to put subjects in the position to make generalisations about the reliability of the evidence provided by each informant. Neither 2-year-olds nor animals responded differently to the reliable and unreliable informants. However, while children became less likely to follow the indications of either informant in later trials, animals continued to follow both at a similar rate. This could suggest that children were responding differently to the evidence in the task compared to the dogs and pigs.

MSTeams link:

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Spring Semester speakers:

Dr Pawel Fedurek (he/his) 

Lecturer in Psychology 

Behaviour and Evolution Research Group (BERG) 

Division of Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences 

University of Stirling 

Stirling, FK9 4LA 
Scotland, UK 

Tel: +44 (0)1786 467844 

Twitter: @fedurekp  @BERG_Stirling​

Staff page | BERG page

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