Inhibitory control helps children resist misleading testimony when they know the truth

Children aged two to four years are better at resisting an adult’s or peer’s false claim about where a treat is hidden when they have seen the hiding event themselves, and their inhibitory control is linked to that resistance, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology. The findings suggest that the ability to suppress a prepotent response is particularly relevant when children must resolve a conflict between their own first-hand knowledge and socially communicated information.

Previous research has shown that young children have a strong bias to believe: they repeatedly follow an informant’s cue about a reward’s location even when that testimony is misleading. In one influential study, only 6 percent of 2.5-year-olds’ initial responses matched misleading testimony, but that percentage increased to 62 percent after testimony was provided, and children continued to follow the informant’s misleading cue across repeated trials despite observing that the informant was unreliable.

To investigate how children’s age, informant age, children’s knowledge about the reward location, and inhibitory control affected their ability to resist this bias, the researchers tested 84 children aged 2 to 4 years in a misleading testimony task. Children had to find a reward hidden in one of two locations. Either an adult or a child informant provided misleading testimony before children were allowed to search. In half of the trials, children knew the reward’s location; in the other half, they did not. Subsequently, children participated in an inhibitory-control task.

The results showed that resistance to misleading testimony increased with age, and children were more likely to resist misleading testimony when they possessed first-hand knowledge about the reward’s location. Informant age had no significant effect. Children’s inhibitory control was positively associated with performance in both knowledge conditions. After controlling for age, the association remained marginally significant in the knowledgeable condition but was not significant in the ignorant condition.

The researchers propose that inhibitory control becomes particularly relevant when children must resolve a conflict between their own knowledge and misleading testimony. When children know the reward’s location, two competing cues must be processed simultaneously: their own first-hand knowledge and the misleading testimony provided by the informant. According to the concept of coactive inhibition, such situations require children to suppress one competing representation in favor of another. In contrast, when children lack direct knowledge about the reward location, they primarily need to evaluate misleading testimony without resolving a direct conflict between competing representations.

The observed pattern may help explain contradictory findings in the literature. Studies reporting significant relations between inhibitory control and resistance to misleading testimony often allowed children to observe the hiding event themselves, providing them with first-hand knowledge about the correct location. In contrast, studies reporting null findings frequently prevented children from acquiring such knowledge. By manipulating children’s knowledge state within the same paradigm, the present study directly examined this methodological difference.

The findings also contribute to the broader theoretical debate regarding the origins of children’s bias to believe and its developmental decline. Several explanations have been proposed for developmental changes in children’s susceptibility to misleading testimony, including developing social-cognitive abilities such as Theory of Mind, the understanding of communicative intentions, children’s social motivations to cooperate with informants, or the developing experience to weigh epistemic states. The present findings do not allow the researchers to distinguish among these explanations directly, but the observed relation between inhibitory control and resistance to misleading testimony suggests that executive processes may form at least part of the explanation.

Notably, even in the knowledgeable condition children continued to follow the misleading testimony in a substantial proportion of trials, indicating that direct knowledge does not completely eliminate the bias to believe. Testimony retains considerable influence even when children possess contradictory first-hand evidence, suggesting that the bias to believe remains remarkably robust even in preschool age.

The researchers note several limitations. The study relied on videotaped informants, and the prerecorded informant was not visible during the hiding events, leaving some ambiguity about whether children assumed that he had visual access to the hiding process. The correlational nature of the analyses does not allow causal conclusions regarding the role of inhibitory control, and inhibitory control was assessed using a single spatial-conflict task. Future studies should examine whether the present findings replicate with live informants, include inhibitory-control training, and investigate how mechanisms such as Theory of Mind interact with inhibitory control during children’s evaluations of testimony.

The bias to believe has deep roots in human development. From an evolutionary standpoint, accepting information from others at face value may be an efficient strategy: children cannot personally verify everything they need to learn, from which foods are safe to which animals are dangerous. Trusting testimony allows them to piggyback on the accumulated knowledge of their community. Yet this same strategy leaves young children vulnerable when informants are wrong or deliberately deceptive. Understanding when and how children begin to filter the information they receive is therefore a central question in developmental psychology, with implications that extend to education, courtroom testimony, and everyday caregiving.

The distinction between knowledgeable and ignorant trials in the new study is theoretically important because it isolates what happens when testimony genuinely conflicts with something the child already knows. In daily life, such conflicts are common: a parent may claim a favorite toy is in one place when the child remembers seeing it elsewhere, or a peer may insist on a rule that contradicts what the child observed. The finding that children resist misleading testimony more often when they possess first-hand knowledge suggests that direct experience serves as an anchor, giving children something concrete to defend against social pressure. At the same time, the fact that children still followed misleading testimony in a meaningful share of knowledgeable trials shows that social information can override even vivid personal observation during the preschool years.

The role of inhibitory control fits within a broader picture of executive function development. Inhibitory control, the capacity to suppress a dominant or automatic response in favor of a less salient one, improves markedly between ages two and five, paralleling maturation of prefrontal brain circuits. Tasks measuring this ability typically ask children to resist a habitual action, such as responding to a stimulus on one side when the rule points to the other. In the misleading testimony paradigm, the prepotent response may be the socially communicated information itself, which children are predisposed to accept. Suppressing that response in favor of one’s own observation arguably demands more inhibitory effort than simply searching without conflicting cues, which is precisely the pattern the study’s results suggest.

The finding that informant age did not significantly affect performance is noteworthy given earlier literature. Previous work indicated that preschoolers often trust adults more than peers, particularly when both informants have been equally reliable. The absence of an informant-age effect in this study may reflect features of the paradigm, such as the use of videotaped informants, or it may indicate that when children hold strong first-hand knowledge, the identity of the misleading informant matters less than the conflict itself. Further research with live informants and varied reliability histories would help clarify how source characteristics interact with children’s own knowledge state.

The developmental increase in resistance across ages two to four aligns with the view that skepticism toward testimony is gradually acquired rather than present from the start. According to influential theoretical accounts, unconditional trust may be the default stance of young learners, while doubt is a cognitively effortful achievement that emerges with experience and maturing executive resources. The present results are consistent with this framework, since older children and children with stronger inhibitory control were better able to override misleading cues. However, because the study measured inhibitory control at a single point in time and relied on correlational analyses, it cannot determine whether improving inhibitory control causes greater resistance, or whether both abilities develop in parallel under the influence of other factors.

Practical implications may follow from these findings. Caregivers and educators who want children to trust their own observations might benefit from ensuring that children witness relevant events directly before receiving verbal information about them. Conversely, the persistence of the bias to believe even among knowledgeable children underscores why young witnesses may be swayed by suggestive questioning, a concern long raised in forensic contexts. Repeated or confident assertions from adults can reshape what children report, even when children initially know better.

Future work could extend these findings in several directions. Training studies could test whether strengthening inhibitory control causally improves children’s resistance to misleading testimony. Longitudinal designs could track whether individual differences in executive function in toddlerhood predict later skepticism. Researchers might also examine whether the knowledge-based advantage holds for other domains, such as misleading labels, claims about object identities, or testimony about absent events, and whether the coactive-inhibition account generalizes beyond spatial search tasks. Together with the present results, such studies would sharpen understanding of how children balance the immense value of social learning against the need to protect their own first-hand knowledge from being overwritten.

Subject of Research: Inhibitory control supports children's resistance to misleading testimony when they possess first-hand knowledge

Article Title: Inhibitory control supports children's resistance to misleading testimony when they possess first-hand knowledge

Article References: Buttelmann, D., Chappuis, M., Schmid, Y., Zeilstra, D., & Jenni, S. (2026). Inhibitory control supports children's resistance to misleading testimony when they possess first-hand knowledge. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 4, Article 1861910. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1861910

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdpys.2026.1861910

Keywords: Inhibitory, control, supports, children's, resistance, misleading, testimony, they, possess, first-hand, knowledge, scientific research