Poster #196 - The price of knowledge: Children infer epistemic desires and rewards from exploratory behavior

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Over the course of just one day, we interact with others in myriad ways. Each of these agents has their own knowledge, beliefs and desires, and acts to pursue their own goals. To effectively navigate this social world, we must be able to quickly infer unobservable mental states from other agents’ behavior. In particular, understanding others’ epistemic states may be important as we try to decode others’ past actions, predict future behavior, and decide how to act ourselves.

One cue to an agent’s knowledge might be their exploratory behavior: whether and when they choose to seek information. Much prior work has investigated children’s own exploration; less is known about how children infer knowledge by observing others’ exploratory choices, and the cost of these choices. We investigate this question across two experiments.

In Experiment 1, four- and five-year-olds (n=48) were introduced to a strong and a weak puppet, and to two boxes. Puppets demonstrated their strength by lifting a box (one easily, and one with great effort). While the puppets were absent, children saw that there was a rubber duck underneath the other box. Next, each puppet was told there was something special underneath this box, and was given a chance to lift it. The strong puppet again lifted the box easily, and the weak puppet with great effort. Children were then asked to identify which of the puppets had really wanted to know what was under the box. Both four- and five-year-olds thought the weak puppet was the one with greater epistemic desire (32 of 48, bootstrapped 95% CI: 54.2 – 79.2). A logistic regression predicting performance based on age revealed no age difference (β = -0.11, p = 0.86).

Experiment 2 was nearly identical to Experiment 1, with one difference: After puppets were told there was something special underneath the other box, both puppets refused to lift the box to see what was there. Children were asked which puppet had already known what was under the box. Both four- and five-year-olds judged that the strong puppet had already known what was under this box (36 of 48, bootstrapped 95% CI: 62.5 – 87.5). A logistic regression revealed no age difference (β = -0.65, p = 0.4); see Figure 1 for results of both experiments.

Collectively, these studies suggest that children make inferences about others’ knowledge from their information-seeking behaviors. Specifically, children take into account others’ costs to infer their epistemic rewards, making inferences about epistemic desires and prior knowledge from behavior. Prior work suggests that cost and reward reasoning are the building blocks of action understanding in Theory of Mind (Jara-Ettinger, Gweon, Tenenbaum & Schulz, 2016). Therefore, the current results demonstrate that our abilities to reason about others’ epistemic states are also embedded within Theory of Mind, highlighting the role of mental state reasoning in children’s knowledge attributions.

Authors

• Rosie Aboody, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Julian Jara-Ettinger, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author