Dr Bahar Köymen will present the next LuCiD seminar on children's reasoning with peers. The seminar will take place from 11.00-12.30 on Tuesday 7th June at the Lancaster University and is open to anyone wishing to attend.
Abstract
Reasoning is classically viewed as an individual skill enabling a person to reach conclusions based on evidence. More recent accounts, however, have highlighted that reasoning – in the more restricted sense of explicating reasons for actions or conclusions – is a fundamentally social skill enabling two or more people to produce and evaluate one another’s arguments in order to reach joint decisions (Mercier & Sperber, 2011; Tomasello, 2014). Therefore, in making joint decisions with a partner, children must evaluate the evidence behind their respective claims and so the rationality of their respective proposals. In this talk I will present a series of studies in which 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children produced and evaluated reasons with their peer partners to reach joint decisions. The findings suggest that children as young as 3-year-olds are able to reason with others. Children get better at reasoning in late preschool ages and eventually become very “strategic” reasoners at school ages. Overall, these results support the view of children's joint reasoning as a fundamentally cooperative enterprise aimed at making jointly rational decisions.
Where: Room D18, Fylde Building, Lancaster University
When: 11.00-12.30, Tuesday 7th June
Directions
Details for getting to Lancaster University can be found on their website, and Fylde Building is building 47, grid reference D8 on the campus map.
More Information
View the seminar poster for further details. (PDF will open in new window)
Author
LuCiD
The ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD) is a five year research collaboration working with partners from across the world to transform our understanding of how children learn to communicate with language.