Child's selective trust in digital informants: An international collaboration with the University of Louisville (USA)

• Grant number: 25/02162-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: August 12, 2025
• End date: December 19, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Human Development Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Débora de Hollanda Souza
• Grantee: Bruna Motta Fodra
• Supervisor: Judith Harmony Danovitch
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Louisville (UofL), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/06451-9 - Who is more trustworthy?: Selectuve Trust in children aged 6 to 11 in digital voice assistants, BP.MS

Abstract

For the past 20 years, important work has been conducted on the development of selective trust in children, which is the ability to discriminate between good and bad informants. There is now evidence that children as young as 3 do not trust any source of information indiscriminately. On the contrary, they evaluate potential informants' past history as reliable or unreliable sources and when that history is not available, they use different social cues to make their trust judgments (e.g., Clément et al., 2004; Harris, 2012; Souza & Messias, 2020). Not only do children trust human beings selectively, but also other sources of information, such as books, fictional characters, computers, the internet, etc. The master's project associated with this proposal (FAPESP 2024/06451-9) aims to investigate children's selective trust in digital voice assistants. The present application, in turn, seeks support for an international visit to Dr. Danovitch's laboratory at the University of Louisville (USA) for a period of 4 months. Dr. Danovitch has published extensively on children's selective trust and learning. Ongoing research at her lab investigates how children learn to trust from different sources of information and children's STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) learning. Therefore, a visit to Dr. Danovitch's lab will be a great opportunity to learn more about her lab's ongoing research on trust and about the methods and data analyses being used in her lab. More specifically, the goals of this visit are (i) to receive training in data coding and data analysis, (ii) to learn more about selective trust research being conducted at Dr. Danovitch's lab, and (iii) discuss possible future collaborations. Additionally, the candidate will benefit from taking part in lab group meetings and having the opportunity to visit other top child development research labs at UofL, such as the Infant Cognition Lab, coordinated by Dr. Cara Cashon, the Language Acquisition Research and Exploration Lab, by Dr. Maria Kondaurova and the Laboratory of Brain and Attention Development, coordinated by Dr. Andrew Lynn.