Response latencies and eye gaze provide insight on how toddlers gather evidence under uncertainty

• Published in: Nature human behaviour Vol. 4; no. 9; pp. 928 - 936
• Main Authors: Leckey, Sarah, Selmeczy, Diana, Kazemi, Alireza, Johnson, Elliott G., Hembacher, Emily, Ghetti, Simona
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01-09-2020; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 4014/4004; 4014/477; Accumulation; Attention - physiology; Behavioral Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Child, Preschool; Diffusion models; Experimental Psychology; Eye fixation; Eye movements; Eye Movements - physiology; Female; Fixation, Ocular - physiology; Humans; Life Sciences; Male; Microeconomics; Neurosciences; Personality and Social Psychology; Preschool children; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Reaction time; Reaction Time - physiology; Toddlers; Uncertainty; Visual Perception - physiology
• ISSN: 2397-3374; 2397-3374
• DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-0913-y

Toddlers exhibit behaviours that suggest judicious responses to states of uncertainty (for example, turning to adults for help), but little is known about the informational basis of these behaviours. Across two experiments, of which experiment 2 was a preregistered replication, 160 toddlers (aged 25 to 32 months) identified a target from two partially occluded similar (for example, elephant versus bear) or dissimilar (for example, elephant versus broccoli) images. Accuracy was lower for the similar trials than for the dissimilar trials. By fitting drift–diffusion models to response times, we found that toddlers accumulated evidence more slowly but required less evidence for similar trials compared with dissimilar trials. By analysing eye movements, we found that toddlers took longer to settle on the selected image during inaccurate trials and switched their gaze between response options more frequently during inaccurate trials and accurately identified similar items. Exploratory analyses revealed that the evidence-accumulation parameter correlated positively with the use of uncertainty language. Overall, these findings inform theories on the emergence of evidence accumulation under uncertainty.
Leckey et al. show that toddlers approach difficult decisions by accumulating evidence slowly and seeking additional information.