Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Critical thinking is considered by many in our society to be essential to navigate a complex world and a constantly changing informational landscape. Although the capacity for critical thinking is most often attributed to adults or adolescents, there are early-developing skills demonstrated even by young children that relate to this construct, even if these abilities are not as sophisticated as a mature level of critical thinking. For instance, evaluating sources of information is an important part of critical thinking skills, and even preschoolers demonstrate what researchers call selective learning, or a preference to learn from people who display credibility-related attributes. The present research aims to explore young children's selective learning skills as they relate to other early critical thinking-like skills and are expressed across a variety of situations. In Part 1, studies examine factors, both internal and external to the child, that lead them to deploy (or fail to deploy) selective learning skills in a given situation. These studies evaluate, for instance, how children interpret credibility-related attributes such as confidence and statements of disagreement, and whether children's interpretations can help us understand why they use certain learning strategies. They also examine circumstances when children can be misled by attributes that are not in fact relevant to an individual's credibility as a source of information. In Part 2, studies examine reliability of measurement for tasks assessing children's selective learning skills as well as other critical thinking-like skills, specifically metacognition, counterfactual thinking and early scientific reasoning. Using tasks that are determined to be sufficiently reliable for measuring individual differences, the relation between children's performance across different types of critical thinking-like skills is investigated. We also evaluate the relations between these skills and several fundamental cognitive skills (e.g., language development, executive function) as well as external factors such as parental influences. Together, these research avenues advance our fundamental understanding of early learning, with implications for our general understanding of human cognitive development and for potential practical applications: Better understanding the earliest manifestations of critical thinking-like skills can lead to the development of interventions, either by parents or education professionals, aimed at improving these abilities and encouraging their use and expression in relevant contexts.