Preschoolers use exploratory approaches to selective social learning.

Abstract

Preschoolers evaluate many cues when making inferences about others (Harris et al., 2018). It is unclear whether children's understanding of inference-making is sophisticated enough that they alsoseek outthe most relevant cues for making specific inferences. Here, we tasked 4- and 5-year-olds and adults with a modified epistemic trust paradigm in which they were told to select one of two informants to help them learn about novel objects. However, before doing so, participants were told that they could learn up to three pieces of information about the informants: what they know (epistemic cue), how they play with their friends (benevolence cue), or what they look like (appearance cue). Of particular interest was which cue participants prioritized (picked first) and what strategies they used for seeking information. In Study 1, adults prioritized learning epistemic information and tended to employ efficient information-seeking strategies (selecting the fewest cues possible to make their inferences). Children, on the other hand, chose each cue first at relatively equal rates and tended to employ exploratory strategies for information-seeking (sampling broadly from the available information). This was even the case in Study 2, in which the informativeness of the appearance and benevolence cues was reduced. These studies raise questions about the way in which children make inferences about others and point to a tendency for children to employ exploratory strategies for learning about others (Gopnik, 2020).