Children have many early abilities that we didn't know exactly. When we studied cognitive development, we realized that children get many abilities earlier than we anticipated. Among these abilities such as object concept, number concept, and person concept, I think I would remember children's preference for reliable and accurate source informants. I was surprised by children's ability that they can distinguish who is reliable informant and even prefer the informant when I studied cognitive development. This ability seems high-developed ability than any others to me.
This resulted from one experiment. First, an experimenter presented children with two speakers who differ in their reliability for 3 or 4 times for familization. One person was consistently naming object accurately, the other was consistently miss-naming the object. Then the experimenter asked explicit judgment question, asking children to indicate the speaker who was not very good at naming things. Finally, the experimenter asked children to request and endorse information from one of the speakers. The result was that even a 2-year-old child preferred more reliable and accurate source informants. According to this kind of experiments, psychologists realized that cognitive development emerges more continuous and earlier than my thought and previous thought of Piaget.
I was actually very surprised with how many abilities infants develop at such early ages. I too, didn't expect children to be able to distinguish who they found reliable based on the experiment. Learning about this definitely gave me a knew knowledge about child development. Great post!
I totally agree with you, children are a lot smarter than you think they are. They grasp so many abilities way before you anticipate them to, just like you had said. I have seen this first hand, because I have a younger brother who is 4 years old, and I have seen him grow up and go through the different stages of what you described above. However, when I was thinking back to that it made me realize that most of the things my brother learned or did before the indicated age.