PARENTAL BELIEFS ABOUT CHILD-DEVELOPMENT AND PARENTAL INFERENCES ABOUT ACTIONS DURING CHILD-REARING EPISODES

The way parents' beliefs on child development support the elaboration of practical inferences during everyday child-rearing episodes was exa mined. We contrasted two models based respectively on the classical an d the connectionist view of schema approaches. According to the classi cal view, parents activate preformed packages of beliefs in order to p roduce inferences whereas under the connectionist view, they activate the network of interconnected episodic traces that better fits the inf ormation provided by the situation. In the former case, the quality of the inferences depends on the activation of the proper schema whereas in the latter case it depends on the structure of the information giv en. Two experiments were designed in which parents holding a particula r global belief about child development (either constructivism or envi ronmentalism), were presented with a target couple with similar or dif ferent views with respect to them. In Experiment I, constructivist par ents bearing in mind the couple's belief had to judge a set of words d escribing the couple's image as parents, their educational goals as we ll as a number of sentences describing the couple's child-rearing prac tices during hypothetical episodes. In Experiment 2, environmentalist parents had to judge the couple's practices and the amount of informat ion presented about the couple's ideas as well as its plausibility wer e manipulated. The results indicate that the accuracy and speed in the production of inferences depends on the information presented in the task. When the information is embedded in episodes and a full, plausib le and distinctive account of the couple's belief ave provided then th e production of inferences is performed faster and with more accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of the classical and connectionist views of schema approaches.