In pursuing goals, people seek favorable odds. We investigated whether young children use this fact to infer goals from people's actions across two experiments on Canadian 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 316; 167 girls, 149 boys). Participants' demographic information was not formally collected, but the region is predominantly middle-class and…

Although people take care of their own possessions, they also engage in stewardship and take care of things they do not own. Here, we examined what young children infer when they observe stewardship behavior of an object. Through four experiments on predominantly middle-class Canadian children (total N = 350, 168 girls and 182 boys from a…

As adults, we intuitively understand how others' goals influence their information-seeking preferences. For example, you might recommend a dense book full of mechanistic details to someone trying to learn about a topic in-depth, but a more lighthearted book filled with surprising stories to someone seeking entertainment. Moreover, you might do…

Children have a robust social preference for people similar to them, like those who share their language, accent, and race. In the present research, we show that this preference can diminish when children consider who they want to learn about. Across three experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds (total N = 160; 74 female, 86 male, from the Waterloo region…

Children are sensitive to their own and others' epistemic states and use these to guide their learning and communication. Here, we systematically examined children's use of epistemic states to make diagnostic social inferences. Specifically, we investigated children's group membership inferences based on what others do and do not know and what…

Do children always conform to a majority's testimony, or do the pragmatics of that testimony matter? We investigated the influence of pragmatics on conforming to a majority across 2 domains: when learning about object labels and when learning about causal relationships. Four- and 5-year-olds (N = 250) were given a choice between an object endorsed…

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' (N = 194) appreciation of the link between knowledge and ownership. Namely, we asked whether preschoolers appreciate the ways in which owners are typically knowledgeable about artifacts. Experiment 1 revealed that 4- and 5-year-olds view owners as better sources of knowledge about artifacts than those who simply…

To successfully navigate an uncertain world, one has to learn the relationship between cues (e.g., wind speed, atmospheric pressure) and outcomes (e.g., rain). When learning, it is possible to actively manipulate the cue values to test hypotheses about this relationship directly. Across two studies, we investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds actively…

The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children's inferences about their…

To acquire social conventional knowledge, children must distinguish between behaviors that are practiced by groups of people versus those that are practiced by individuals. How do children infer the scope (i.e., level of generality) of social behavior? Prior work has addressed this question by focusing on the cues or instruction that adults…

Novel causal systems pose a problem of variable choice: How can a reasoner decide which variable is causally relevant? Which variable in the system should a learner manipulate to try to produce a desired, yet unfamiliar, casual outcome? In much causal reasoning research, participants learn how a particular set of preselected variables produce a…

Interpreting iconic gestures can be challenging for children. Here, we explore the features and functions of iconic gestures that make them more challenging for young children to interpret than instrumental actions. In Study 1, we show that 2.5-year-olds are able to glean size information from handshape in a simple gesture, although their…

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

Secrets carry valuable social information. Because the content of secrets can be damaging to the secret-keeper's reputation, people should only disclose their secrets to people whom they trust. Therefore, tracking which people know each other's secrets can be used as cue of social relationships: If one person tells another person a secret, those…