Doctoral Student
University of Toronto
Starting from infancy, we are inundated by information from different sources. How do we choose which information to attend to and which source to trust? How do we interpret the information we receive? How do we revise what we believe? How do we justify our beliefs? What kind of biases do we show when seeking and using information? Are there cross-cultural differences in the development of social learning and reasoning? These questions constitute the focus of my research interests, whose overarching theme is the development of human social learning and reasoning.
In this line of research, I examine children’s and adults’ selective epistemic trust and inferences about testimony. I investigate the epistemic and social cues (e.g., predictability, similarity) they use to infer information reliability. I am also interested in children’s inferences about evaluative information (e.g., “It’s good!”) as well as non-evaluative information (e.g., “Clouds fill with water”). I conduct research aiming to understand how children and adults make speaker-specific inferences about a person’s ambiguous evaluations (e.g., “It’s okay!”) using that person’s past comments. For example, when two people say, “It’s okay”, they might not correspond to similar levels of liking. When and how do we understand that each person is a different indicator?
This line of work focuses on whether and how speakers of different languages differ in their argumentation and belief revision. For example, in Turkish, it is grammatically obligatory to express how information was acquired (whether the speaker is reporting direct observation or hearsay), while it is not obligatory in English. I investigate whether this type of linguistic cues facilitates young children’s reasoning. In two projects, we examined how 3- and 5-year-old Turkish-speaking and English-speaking children talk about the reliability of the information they received to convince someone, i.e., metatalk, and revise their existing beliefs depending on the reliability of the counterevidence. We found that children as young as three years of age produce metatalk to justify their beliefs and revise their own beliefs based on the reliability of the information offered to them. Although Turkish-speaking children had advantages in justifying their beliefs, both linguistic groups showed equal performance in revising their beliefs.
Are we rational learners seeking the truth? In this line of research, I examine the biases we have in information seeking and argumentation. For example, we tend to seek and use more information in favor of our perspective than those against it, i.e., confirmation/myside bias. I investigate whether the presence of this bias and other biases, e.g., positivity bias, depends on the aim of the information search and the presence of a conflicting perspective. I explore whether and how these tendencies change across the lifespan by conducting studies with 5- to 55-year-olds. I am interested in the theories of reasoning and argumentation; thus, in addition to providing evidence for the empirical research questions I have, I also try to test the claims of the existing theories.