Children's developing ability to recognize deceptive use of true information.

The strategic use of deliberate omissions, conveying true but selective information for deceptive purposes, is a prevalent and pernicious disinformation tactic. Crucially, its recognition requires engaging in a sophisticated, multi-part social cognitive reasoning process. In two preregistered studies, we investigated the development of children's ability to engage in this process and successfully recognize this form of deception, finding that children even as young as 5 years are capable of doing so, but only with sufficient scaffolding.

Look Again: Pedagogical Demonstration Facilitates Children's Use of Counterevidence.

In learning about the world children must not only make inferences based on minimal evidence, but must deal with conflicting evidence and question those initial inferences when they appear to be wrong. Four experiments (N = 144) found that young children were significantly more likely to revise their initial inferences when conflicting evidence was explicitly demonstrated for them. Four- and five-year-old children saw deterministic evidence about which objects had causal powers, and then saw counterevidence conflicting with that initial pattern.