Thinking takes time: Children use agents' response times to infer the source, quality, and complexity of their knowledge.

Limits on mental speed entail speed-accuracy tradeoffs for problem-solving, but memory and perception are accurate on much faster timescales. While response times drive inference across the behavioral sciences, they may also help laypeople interpret each othejognrs' everyday behavior. We examined children's (ages 5 to 10) use of agents' response time to infer the source and quality of their knowledge.

The potential for effective reasoning guides children's preference for small group discussion over crowdsourcing.

Communication between social learners can make a group collectively "wiser" than any individual, but conformist tendencies can also distort collective judgment. We asked whether intuitions about when communication is likely to improve or distort collective judgment could allow social learners to take advantage of the benefits of communication while minimizing the risks. In three experiments (n = 360), 7- to 10-year old children and adults decided whether to refer a question to a small group for discussion or "crowdsource" independent judgments from individual advisors.

An Illusion of Self-Sufficiency for Learning About Artifacts in Scaffolded Learners, But Not Observers.

Two studies ask whether scaffolded children (n = 243, 5-6 years and 9-10 years) recognize that assistance is needed to learn to use complex artifacts. In Study 1, children were asked to learn to use a toy pantograph. While children recognized the need for assistance for indirect knowledge, 70% of scaffolded children claimed that they would have learned to use the artifact without assistance, even though 0% of children actually succeeded without assistance.