Fourteen-month-olds selectively search for and use information depending on the familiarity of the informant in both laboratory and home contexts Andy Schieler a,⇑ , Melissa Koenig b , David Buttelmann c a Institute for Education, Upbringing, and Care in Childhood | Rheinland-Pfalz, Department of Social Sciences, University of Applied Sciences Koblenz, D-56075 Koblenz, Germany b Institute of Child Development, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA c Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Bern, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland article info Article history: Received 1 December 2017 Revised 8 April 2018 Available online 20 June 2018 Keywords: Selective social learning Perception and use of social information Familiar versus unfamiliar informants Laboratory versus home Exploratory behavior Social referencing abstract Infants are selective in their learning from others. However, there is only very limited research on the possible factors that shape this selectivity, especially when it comes to the impact of infants’ familiarity with the informant and the context. The current study investigated whether 14-month-olds preferred to receive and use information provided by an unfamiliar informant (experimenter) compared with a familiar informant (parent) and whether this pattern depended on the context (home vs. laboratory). We tested infants either in the laboratory (n = 67) or in their home (n = 70). When both informants presented a novel object with positive or negative emotions, we measured infants’ gaze behavior as an indi- cator for information search. When infants acted on the novel object themselves, we measured their exploratory behavior as an indicator of information use. Results revealed no effect of context on infants’ information search and use. Rather, we found that the familiarity of informant had distinct effects on infant attention and object exploration. Namely, infants looked longer at the unfa- miliar informant across contexts, but they explored more when the familiar informant presented the object compared with when the unfamiliar informant did so. Thus, during information search, 14-month-olds paid most attention to an unfamiliar source of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.05.010 0022-0965/Ó 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: schieler@hs-koblenz.de (A. Schieler). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 174 (2018) 112–129 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp