Celeste Kidd

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of California, Berkeley

How do children decide when to believe a claim? Here we show that children fact-check claims more and are better able to catch misinformation when they have been exposed to detectable inaccuracies. In two experiments (N = 122), 4–7-year-old children exposed to falsity (as opposed to all true information) sampled more evidence before verifying a tes...

Models can convey biases and false information to users.

Many social and legal conflicts hinge on semantic disagreements. Understanding the origins and implications of these disagreements necessitates novel methods for identifying and quantifying variation in semantic cognition between individuals. We collected conceptual similarity ratings and feature judgements from a variety of words in two domains. W...

Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review develop-mental evidence that this metacognitive strategy does not require reportable processing. Uncertainty prompts non-verbal human infants and non-human animals to engage in strategies lik...

Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review developmental evidence that this metacognitive strategy does not require reportable processing. Uncertainty prompts nonverbal human infants and nonhuman animals to engage in strategies like s...

Normative learning theories dictate that we should preferentially attend to informative sources, but only up to the point that our limited learning systems can process their content. Humans, including infants, show this predicted strategic deployment of attention. Here, we demonstrate that rhesus monkeys, much like humans, attend to events of moder...

People rely on social information to inform their beliefs. We ask whether and to what degree the perceived prevalence of a belief influences belief adoption. We present the results of two experiments that show how increases in a person’s estimated prevalence of a belief led to increased endorsement of said belief. Belief endorsement rose when impre...

Analyses of political discourse typically focus on the semantic content of politicians’ statements. The approach treats the meaning of a speaker’s words as independent from the speaker’s identity itself; however, there are reasons to believe that one might influence the other. Features of a speaker’s identity influence others’ judgements of their c...

Normative learning theories dictate that we should preferentially attend to informative sources, but only up to the point that our limited learning systems can process their content. Humans, including infants, show this predicted strategic deployment of attention. Here we demonstrate that rhesus monkeys, much like humans, attend to events of modera...

Many social and legal conflicts come down to differences in semantics. Yet, semantic variation between individuals and people’s awareness of this variation have been relatively neglected by experimental psychology. Here, across two experiments, we quantify the amount of agreement and disagreement between ordinary semantic concepts in thepopulation,...

People rely heavily on information from the social world to inform their real-world beliefs. We ask whether the perceived prevalence of a belief, divorced from any direct evidence, serves as an independent cue in belief updating. Using real-world pseudoscientific and conspiratorial claims, our experiment (N = 403 American adults) shows that increas...

COVID-19 and the 2021 U.S. Capitol attacks have highlighted the potential dangers of pseudoscientific and conspiratorial belief adoption. Approaches to combating misinformed beliefs have tried to “pre-bunk” or “inoculate” people against misinformation adoption and have yielded only modest results. These approaches presume that some citizens may be...

Despite increased awareness of the lack of gender equity in academia and a growing number of initiatives to address issues of diversity, change is slow, and inequalities remain. A major source of inequity is gender bias, which has a substantial negative impact on the careers, work-life balance, and mental health of underrepresented groups in scienc...

How do children allocate their attention? There is too much information in the world to encode it all, so children must pick and choose. How do they organize their sampling to make the most of the learning opportunities that surround them? Previous work shows infants actively seek intermediately predictable information. Here we employ eye-tracking...

We apply a new quantitative method for investigating how children's exploration changes across age in order to gain insight into how exploration unfolds over the course of a human life from a life-history perspective. In this study, different facets of exploratory play were quantified using a novel touchscreen environment across a large sample and...

Classic theories of multi-attribute choice typically assume that preferences are an additive function of attribute values. However recent work (Evers et al.) demonstrates a preference for simplicity that can violate the most basic assumptions and predictions of conventional models. For example, a set of 7 colored pencils that are all unique colors...

One of the greatest challenges of developmental psychology is figuring out what children are thinking. This is particularly difficult in early childhood, for children who are prelinguistic or are just beginning to speak their first words. In this stage, children’s responses are commonly measured by presenting young children with a limited choice be...

Recent work has argued that curiosity can improve learning. However, these studies also leave open the possibility that being on the verge of knowing can itself induce curiosity. We investigate how prior knowledge relates to curiosity and subsequent learning using a trivia question task. Curiosity in our task is best predicted by a learner’s estima...

Certain social context features (e.g., maternal presence) are known to increase young children's exploration, a key process by which they learn. Yet limited research investigates the role of social context, especially peer presence, in exploration across development. We investigate whether the effect of peer presence on exploration is mediated by a...

Prior research has yielded mixed findings on whether learners’ certainty reflects veridical probabilities from observed evidence. We compared predictions from an idealized model of learning to humans’ subjective reports of certainty during a Boolean concept-learning task in order to examine subjective certainty over the course of abstract, logical...

Background: Seasons affect many social, economic, and biological outcomes, particularly in low-resource settings, and some studies suggest that birth season affects child growth. Aim: To study a predictor of stunting that has received limited attention: birth season. Subjects and methods: This study uses cross-sectional data collected during 2008 i...

Expectations learned from our perceptual experiences, culture, and language can shape how we perceive, interact with, and remember features of the past. Here, we questioned whether environment also plays a role. We tested recognition memory for color in Bolivia's indigenous Tsimanè people, who experience a different color environment than standard...

A critical part of infants' ability to acquire any language involves segmenting continuous speech input into discrete word forms. Certain properties of words could provide infants with reliable cues to word boundaries. Here we investigate the potential utility of vowel harmony (VH), a phonological property whereby vowels within a word systematicall...

A critical part of infants’ ability to acquire any language involves segmenting continuous speech input into discrete word-forms. Certain properties of words could provide infants with reliable cues to word boundaries. Here we investigate the potential utility of vowel harmony (VH), a phonological property whereby vowels within a word systematicall...

Objectives: We assessed associations between child stunting, recovery, and faltering with schooling and human capital skills in a native Amazonian society of horticulturalists-foragers (Tsimane'). Methods: We used cross-sectional data (2008) from 1262 children aged 6 to 16 years in 53 villages to assess contemporaneous associations between three...

A critical part of infants’ ability to acquire any language involves segmenting continuous speech input into discrete word-forms. Certain properties of words could provide infants with reliable cues to word boundaries. Here we investigate the potential utility of vowel harmony (VH), a phonological property whereby vowels within a word systematicall...

Significance One mystery of human evolution is why our cognition differs qualitatively from our closest evolutionary relatives. Here we show how natural selection for large brains may lead to premature newborns, which themselves require more intelligence to raise, and thus may select for even larger brains. As we show, these dynamics can be self-re...

In an exciting in-depth study of Korean language learners, Han, Musolino, and Lidz (1) show that children often arrive at grammars that do not match their parents. Learners appear to choose between multiple linguistic systems that are consistent with their most direct observed evidence. The authors frame these results as informing the nature vs. nu...

Curiosity is a basic element of our cognition, but its biological function, mechanisms, and neural underpinning remain poorly understood. It is nonetheless a motivator for learning, influential in decision-making, and crucial for healthy development. One factor limiting our understanding of it is the lack of a widely agreed upon delineation of what...

Cooperation often results in a final material resource that must be shared, but deciding how to distribute that resource is not straightforward. A distribution could count as fair if all members receive an equal reward (egalitarian distributions), or if each member's reward is proportional to their merit (merit-based distributions). Here, we propos...

Effective allocation of attention is crucial for many cognitive functions, and attentional disorders (e.g., ADHD) negatively impact learning. Despite the importance of the attentional system, the origins of inattentional behavior remain hazy. Here we present a model of an ideal learner that maximizes information gain in an environment containing mu...

Infants must learn about many cognitive domains (e.g., language, music) from auditory statistics, yet capacity limits on their cognitive resources restrict the quantity that they can encode. Previous research has established that infants can attend to only a subset of available acoustic input. Yet few previous studies have directly examined infant...

Studies of infant looking times over the past 50 years have provided profound insights about cognitive development, but their dependent measures and analytic techniques are quite limited. In the context of infants' attention to discrete sequential events, we show how a Bayesian data analysis approach can be combined with a rational cognitive model...

Children are notoriously bad at delaying gratification to achieve later, greater rewards (e.g., Piaget, 1970)-and some are worse at waiting than others. Individual differences in the ability-to-wait have been attributed to self-control, in part because of evidence that long-delayers are more successful in later life (e.g., Shoda, Mischel, & Peake,...

Human infants, like immature members of any species, must be highly selective in sampling information from their environment to learn efficiently. Failure to be selective would waste precious computational resources on material that is already known (too simple) or unknowable (too complex). In two experiments with 7- and 8-month-olds, we measure in...

An example of an animated single-box display used in Experiment 1. (MOV)

An example of an animated three-box display used in Experiment 2. (MOV)

A 7-month-old subject attending to a three-box display in Experiment 2, and then looking away (and subsequently terminating the trial). (MOV)

The ability to infer the referential intentions of speakers is a crucial part of learning a language. Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to do this. Here we provide the first evidence that children also use speech disfluencies to infer speaker intention. Disfluencies (e.g. filled pauses 'uh' and...

Even before birth, infants attend to the statistical properties of their sensory environments to learn about events in world. Tracking these statistics is crucial to mastery of visual, social, linguistic, and cognitive tasks. However, the degree to which their sampling follows prescriptions of rational statistical infer-ence is unclear. Do infants'...

Recent studies have revealed an intriguing link between redundancy and reduction: Words that are more predictable in their context are more commonly reduced (shorter and with less articulatory detail (1,2,3)). These studies have, however, also found a puzzling asymmetry. Content words are reduced when predictable given the previous word, but functi...

In early lexical development, children must learn to map spoken words onto their respective referents. Since multiple objects are typically present when any word is used, a child is charged with the difficult task of inferring the speaker's intended referent. Previous research has uncovered various cues children may use in this task, including cont...

Speakers pronounce predictable words shorter and with less articulatory detail (e.g. Bell et al., 2002). Other studies have found that speakers also modulate the duration of a word, if the next words are not readily available for pronunciation to buy more time (e.g. Clark & Fox Tree, 2002). We present the first studies ever that directly compare an...