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ORANGE COUNTY, CA – If you ask a child under 3 if he wants cake or broccoli, he will answer broccoli eight times out of ten, according to a recent study at the University of California. California to Irvine. .
But the response of toddlers will not necessarily be because they prefer leafy vegetables to sweet sweets; it's because of the order in which the choices are presented.
A study conducted by the University of California at Irvine and published in the online journal PLOS One revealed that young children are highly subject to "recency bias" when they are confronted with "or" questions : they tend to choose the last option what they really want.
"Adults are able to distinguish between choices and are often more likely to choose the first one.This is called primacy bias," says lead author of the study. , Emily Sumner, doctoral candidate in cognitive sciences of the UCI. "But children, especially toddlers younger than 3 years old, who may not know the language well, exhibit a recency bias when they answer questions orally, which means that the last choice presented is more often selected.This field is not fascinating to identify. "
The researchers asked 20 toddlers aged 21 to 27 months 20 questions in which they had to choose between options 1 and 2. They then asked again the same questions, the options being reversed. After responding to each response, the children received a sticker describing their choice. If they did not say which option they wanted, both stickers were visible when the question was asked and they indicated their choice.
When toddlers responded verbally, they chose the last option presented 85.2% of the time. Pointing rather than speaking, they chose the last option only 51.6% of the time. According to Sumner, this difference is related to the development of children's working memory, which concerns immediate conscious perception and linguistic processing.
"When a child points fingers, he can see the options and choose his actual preference," said Sumner. "When they do not have visual references and only hear" or ", they are able to retain the most recently mentioned option according to the phonological loop." Children understand how speech works sounds, but not necessarily what the words mean, they just pick up the last mentioned choice. "
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