Young children consider the expected utility of others' learning to decide what to teach

A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Adaptive Teaching

How do teachers learn about what learners already know? How do learners aid teachers by providing them with information about their background knowledge and what they find confusing? We formalize this collaborative reasoning process using a hierarchical Bayesian model of pedagogy. We then evaluate this model in two online behavioral experiments (N = 312 adults). In Experiment 1, we show that teachers select examples that account for learners' background knowledge, and adjust their examples based on learners' feedback. In Experiment 2, we show that learners strategically provide more feedback when teachers' examples deviate from their background knowledge. These findings provide a foundation for extending computational accounts of pedagogy to richer interactive settings.

Emotions before actions: When children see costs as causal

Adults expect people to be biased by sunk costs, but young children do not. We tested between two accounts for why children overlook the sunk cost bias. On one account, children do not see sunk costs as causal. The other account posits that children see sunk costs as causal, but unlike adults, think future actions cannot make up for sunk costs. These accounts make opposing predictions about whether children should see sunk costs as affecting emotions. Across three experiments, 4-7-year-olds (total N = 320) and adults (total N = 429) saw stories about characters who collected items that were easy or difficult to obtain, and predicted characters' emotions and actions. At all ages, participants anticipated that characters would feel sadder about high-cost objects, but only adults predicted that characters would keep high-cost objects. Our findings show that children see incurred costs as causal, and that costs are integrated children's and adults' theory of emotions. Moreover, the findings suggest that developmental differences in sunk cost reasoning may rest in children's incomplete mental accounting. We also discuss children's reasoning about rational and irrational action.

Children teach sensational information-as long as it is true

When sharing information, teenagers and adults prioritize what is sensational or attention-grabbing, sometimes at the cost of the truth. Nothing is known so far about whether young children prefer to transmit sensational information or what they prioritize when the sensational quality of information conflicts with its truth. In two experiments (N = 136), 4- and 5-year-olds engaged in a forced-choice task in which they selected one of two statements to teach to a peer. In the absence of explicit truth value assignments, children of both ages preferred teaching sensational information over non-sensational (neutral) information (p < .0001). When information was sensational but untrue, truth trumped sensationalism in both age groups (p < .0001). The experiments shed more light on biases that affect the early ontogeny of information exchange. Not only do children prioritize certain kinds of information when teaching, they also actively weigh these preferences against one another and mute their bias for sensationalism when veracity is at stake.

Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks

Capacities to understand and evaluate others' actions are fundamental to human social life. Infants and toddlers are sensitive to the costs of others' actions, infer others' values from the costs of the actions they take, and prefer those who help others to those who hinder them, but it is largely unknown whether and how cost considerations inform early understanding of third-party prosocial actions. In three experiments (N = 94), we asked whether 16-month-old toddlers value agents who selectively help those who need it most. Presented with two agents who attempted two tasks, toddlers preferentially looked to and touched someone who helped the agent in greater need, both when one agent's task required more effort and when the tasks were the same but one agent was weaker. These results provide evidence that toddlers engage in need-based evaluations of helping, applying their understanding of action utilities to their social evaluations.

Choosing Among Undesirable Options: Children Consider Desirability of Available Choices in Evaluation of Socially Mindful Actions

Previous studies show that adults and children evaluate the act of leaving a choice for others as prosocial, and have termed such actions as socially mindful actions. The current study investigates how the desirability of the available options (i.e., whether the available options are desirable or not) may influence adults' and children's evaluation of socially mindful actions. Children (N = 120, 4- to 6-year-olds) and adults (N = 124) were asked to evaluate characters selecting items for themselves from a set of three items-two identical items and one unique item-in a way that either leaves a choice (two diverse items) or leaves no choice (two identical items) for the next person (i.e., the beneficiary). We manipulated whether the available options were either desirable or undesirable (i.e., damaged). We found that adults' and 6-year-olds' evaluation of socially mindful actions is moderated by the desirability of the options. Although they evaluate the act of leaving a choice for others as nicer than the act of leaving no choice both when the choosing options are desirable and when they are undesirable, the discrepancy in the evaluation becomes significantly smaller when the choosing options are undesirable. We also found that inference of the beneficiary's feeling underlies social evaluation of the actor leaving a choice (or not). These findings suggest that children consider both the diversity of options left and the desirability of the available options in understanding and evaluating socially mindful acts.

Teaching categories via examples and explanations

People often learn categories through interaction with knowledgeable others who may use verbal explanations, visual exemplars, or both, to share their knowledge. Verbal and nonverbal means of pedagogical communication are commonly used in conjunction, but their respective roles are not fully understood. In this work, we studied how well these modes of communication work with different category structures. We conducted two experiments to investigate the effect of perceptual confusability and stimulus dimensionality on the effectiveness of verbal, exemplar-based, and mixed communication. One group of participants - teachers - learned a categorization rule and prepared learning materials for the students. Students studied the materials prepared for them and then demonstrated their knowledge on test stimuli. All communication modes were generally successful, but not equivalent, with mixed communication consistently showing best results. When teachers were free to generate as many visual exemplars or words as they wish, verbal and exemplar-based communication showed similar performance, although the verbal channel was slightly less reliable in situations requiring high perceptual precision. At the same time, verbal communication was better suited to handling high-dimensional stimuli when communication volume was restricted. We believe that our work serves as an important step towards studying language as a means for pedagogical category leaning.

Not just if, but how much: Children and adults use cost and need to make evaluations about generosity across contexts

Evaluations of others' generosity are critical for selecting quality social partners, yet the factors which systematically affect these evaluations and whether they vary across development are still relatively unclear. Here, we establish that two key dimensions adults and children (aged 4 to 7 years) consider are the cost associated with a giving action and the need of the recipient, through six pre-registered experiments with Canadian and U.S. American participants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults' and children's third-party evaluations of generosity are sensitive to variations in each factor, across several operationalizations of cost and need in both comparative and standalone contexts, suggesting cost and need can be spontaneously evoked. However, children's responses were more consistent for need scenarios than cost scenarios. In Experiments 3 and 4, we modified our scenarios to evaluate whether variations in cost and need are considered simultaneously in both generosity evaluations and affiliative preferences. Adults' and older children's (ages 6 to 7) evaluations of generosity and affiliative preferences were sensitive to both factors, but younger children did not utilize this information systematically. Importantly, in Experiments 5 and 6, adults' and older children's generosity evaluations were only sensitive to information about cost and need when the giver's actions conferred utility to a recipient, but not when actions were self-serving. Taken together, we establish robust evidence that cost and need are considered in generosity evaluations by demonstrating that Canadian and U.S. American adults and children utilize this information consistently, spontaneously, and simultaneously.

Socially intelligent machines that learn from humans and help humans learn

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to understand and influence other minds. Humans engage in inferential social learning (ISL) by using commonsense psychology to learn from others and help others learn. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are raising new questions about the feasibility of human-machine interactions that support such powerful modes of social learning. Here, we envision what it means to develop socially intelligent machines that can learn, teach, and communicate in ways that are characteristic of ISL. Rather than machines that simply predict human behaviours or recapitulate superficial aspects of human sociality (e.g. smiling, imitating), we should aim to build machines that can learn from human inputs and generate outputs for humans by proactively considering human values, intentions and beliefs. While such machines can inspire next-generation AI systems that learn more effectively from humans (as learners) and even help humans acquire new knowledge (as teachers), achieving these goals will also require scientific studies of its counterpart: how humans reason about machine minds and behaviours. We close by discussing the need for closer collaborations between the AI/ML and cognitive science communities to advance a science of both natural and artificial intelligence. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Cognitive artificial intelligence'.

Not Playing by the Rules: Exploratory Play, Rational Action, and Efficient Search

Recent studies suggest children's exploratory play is consistent with formal accounts of rational learning. Here we focus on the tension between this view and a nearly ubiquitous feature of human play: In play, people subvert normal utility functions, incurring seemingly unnecessary costs to achieve arbitrary rewards. We show that four-and-five-year-old children not only infer playful behavior from observed violations of rational action (Experiment 1), but themselves take on unnecessary costs during both retrieval (Experiment 2) and search (Experiments 3A-B) tasks, despite acting efficiently in non-playful, instrumental contexts. We discuss the value of such apparently utility-violating behavior and why it might serve learning in the long run.

"The Red Spots Are Now Lava, We Shouldn't Step on Them"-The Joint Creation of Novel Arbitrary Social Contexts in Pretend Play

Pretend play has been extensively studied in developmental science, nevertheless important questions remain about how children engage in and navigate between pretend episodes. In this proposal, we scrutinize childhood pretense from a social cognitive developmental point of view. First, we review previous theories of pretend play structured around important questions that pinpoint some attributes of pretend episodes, such as their transient and socially defined nature. In these sections, evidence is also reviewed about children's understanding of these attributes. Following this, we describe a novel proposal of pretend play which extends recent accounts of (pretend) play (Wyman & Rakoczy, 2011; Chu & Schulz, 2020a) by exploiting the importance of social interactions in pretense. We contend that engaging in shared pretending can be considered a manifestation of and support for children's ability to participate in and set up arbitrary contextual boundaries with others. These claims are discussed with regards to how pretend play may figure into social development, its potential implications for intra- as well as intercultural variation, as well as future research.

Teachers recruit mentalizing regions to represent learners' beliefs

Teaching enables humans to impart vast stores of culturally specific knowledge and skills. However, little is known about the neural computations that guide teachers' decisions about what information to communicate. Participants (N = 28) played the role of teachers while being scanned using fMRI; their task was to select examples that would teach learners how to answer abstract multiple-choice questions. Participants' examples were best described by a model that selects evidence that maximizes the learner's belief in the correct answer. Consistent with this idea, participants' predictions about how well learners would do closely tracked the performance of an independent sample of learners (N = 140) who were tested on the examples they had provided. In addition, regions that play specialized roles in processing social information, namely the bilateral temporoparietal junction and middle and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, tracked learners' posterior belief in the correct answer. Our results shed light on the computational and neural architectures that support our extraordinary abilities as teachers.

The cultural evolution of teaching

Teaching is an important process of cultural transmission. Some have argued that human teaching is a cognitive instinct - a form of 'natural cognition' centred on mindreading, shaped by genetic evolution for the education of juveniles, and with a normative developmental trajectory driven by the unfolding of a genetically inherited predisposition to teach. Here, we argue instead that human teaching is a culturally evolved trait that exhibits characteristics of a cognitive gadget. Children learn to teach by participating in teaching interactions with socialising agents, which shape their own teaching practices. This process hijacks psychological mechanisms involved in prosociality and a range of domain-general cognitive abilities, such as reinforcement learning and executive function, but not a suite of cognitive adaptations specifically for teaching. Four lines of evidence converge on this hypothesis. The first, based on psychological experiments in industrialised societies, indicates that domain-general cognitive processes are important for teaching. The second and third lines, based on naturalistic and experimental research in small-scale societies, indicate marked cross-cultural variation in mature teaching practice and in the ontogeny of teaching among children. The fourth line indicates that teaching has been subject to cumulative cultural evolution, i.e. the gradual accumulation of functional changes across generations.

Having less means wanting more: Children hold an intuitive economic theory of diminishing marginal utility

Judgments surrounding resource acquisition and valuation are ubiquitous in daily life. How do humans decide what something is worth to themselves or someone else? One important cue to value is that of resource quantity. As described by economists, the principle of diminishing marginal utility (DMU) holds that as resource abundance increases, the value placed on each unit decreases; likewise, when resources become more scarce, the value placed on each unit rises. While prior research suggests that adults make judgments that align with this concept, it is unclear whether children do so. In Study 1 (n = 104), children (ages 5 through 8) were presented with scenarios involving losses or gains to others' resources and predicted the actions and emotions of the individuals involved. Participants made decisions that aligned with DMU, e.g., expecting individuals with fewer resources to expend more effort for an additional resource than individuals with greater resources. In Study 2 (n = 104), children incorporated information about preferences when inferring others' resource valuations, showing how quantity and preference are both included in children's inferences about others' utility. Our results indicate the early emergence of an intuitive economic theory that aligns with an important economic principle. Long before formal learning on this topic, children integrate quantity and preference information to sensibly predict others' resource valuations, with implications for economic decision-making, social preferences, and judgments of partner quality across the lifespan.

Four-year-olds selectively transmit true information

Two experiments (N = 112) were conducted to examine preschoolers' concern for the truth when transmitting information. A first experiment (Pilot Experiment) revealed that 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, selectively transmitted information marked as true versus information marked as false. The second experiment (Main Experiment) showed that 4-year-olds selectively transmitted true information regardless of whether their audience lacked knowledge (Missing Knowledge Context) or information (Missing Information Context) about the subject matter. Children selected more true information when choosing between true versus false information (Falsity Condition) and when choosing between true information versus information the truth of which was undetermined (Bullshit Condition). The Main Experiment also revealed that 4-year-olds shared information more spontaneously, i.e., before being prompted, when it was knowledge, rather than information, the audience was seeking. The findings add to the field's growing understanding of young children as benevolent sharers of knowledge.

Teaching strategies are shaped by experience with formal education: Experimental evidence from caregiver-child dyads in two Tannese communities

Humans are extraordinary in the extent to which we rely on cumulative culture to act upon and make sense of our environment. Teaching is one social learning process thought to be fundamental to the evolution of cumulative culture as a means of adaptation in our species. However, the frequency of teaching and how we teach are known to vary across human sociocultural contexts. Understanding this variation adds to our understanding of the complex interplay between cognition and culture in shaping learning behavior but also contributes to theory around the costs and benefits of different social learning processes. Here, we examined how prior experience with formal education is related to the frequency and diversity of teaching behaviors in an experimental paradigm where caregivers were motivated (but not instructed) to teach a simple skill to a child (7-10 years old). We identified and coded a suite of subtle nonverbal behaviors that could be construed as facilitating learning. Dyads (n = 64) were recruited from two communities on Tanna Island that differ in their experience with formal schooling and their acceptance of Western institutions. We found evidence for parallel teaching strategies in both communities. However, the rate and diversity of teaching behaviors were positively associated with caregiver's experience with formal schooling and independently and negatively associated with being from a village that rejects Western-derived institutions. These results further our understanding of how multiple cultural processes influence social learning and highlights the powerful influence of formal schooling on the cultural evolution of teaching in humans.

Preference matters: Knowledge of beneficiary's preference influences children's evaluations of the act of leaving a choice for others

People value indirect prosocial actions that benefit others as byproducts of self-oriented actions. One example of such an action is the act of leaving a choice for others when selecting an item for oneself. In this study, we investigated how knowledge of the beneficiary's preference may influence children's evaluations of such actions. Children (n = 91, 4- to 10-year-olds) and adults (n = 43) were asked to evaluate characters taking a snack for themselves from a set of three items-two identical items and one unique item-in a way that either leaves a choice (two different items) or leaves no choice (two identical items) for the next person (the beneficiary). The beneficiary's preference was systematically manipulated as unknown, preferring the unique item, or preferring the item of which there are two. We found notable developmental changes: Children as young as 4 years of age understand that it is nicer not to take away the only thing others prefer; with age, children increasingly appreciate the value of leaving a diverse choice when the beneficiary's preference is unknown; however, when the beneficiary clearly prefers the item of which there are two, children increasingly think that it is nicer to leave two identical but preferred items than to leave a diverse choice. These findings reveal increasing flexibility and subtlety in children's social evaluation of indirect prosocial actions; their evaluation develops from a mere understanding of the value of preference to a flexible appreciation of both preference and choice.

Show or tell? Exploring when (and why) teaching with language outperforms demonstration

People use a wide range of communicative acts across different modalities, from concrete demonstrations to abstract language. While these modalities are typically studied independently, we take a comparative approach and ask when and why one modality might outperform another. We present a series of real-time, multi-player experiments asking participants to teach concepts using either demonstrations or language. Our first experiment (N=416) asks when language might outperform demonstration. We manipulate the complexity of the concept being taught and find that language communicates complex concepts more effectively than demonstration. We then ask why language succeeds in this setting. We hypothesized that language allowed teachers to reference abstract object features (e.g., shapes and colors), while demonstration teachers could only provide concrete examples (specific positive or negative objects). To test this hypothesis, our second experiment (N=568) ablated object features from the teacher's interface. This manipulation severely impaired linguistic (but not demonstrative) teaching. Our findings suggest that language communicates complex concepts by directly transmitting abstract rules. In contrast, demonstrations transmit examples, requiring the learner to infer the rules.

When Naïve Pedagogy Breaks Down: Adults Rationally Decide How to Teach, but Misrepresent Learners' Beliefs

From early in childhood, humans exhibit sophisticated intuitions about how to share knowledge efficiently in simple controlled studies. Yet, untrained adults often fail to teach effectively in real-world situations. Here, we explored what causes adults to struggle in informal pedagogical exchanges. In Experiment 1, we first showed evidence of this effect, finding that adult participants failed to communicate their knowledge to naïve learners in a simple teaching task, despite reporting high confidence that they taught effectively. Using a computational model of rational teaching, we found that adults assigned to our teaching condition provided highly informative examples but failed to teach effectively because their examples were tailored to learners who were only considering a small set of possible explanations. In Experiment 2, we then found experimental evidence for this possibility, showing that knowledgeable participants systematically misunderstand the beliefs of naïve participants. Specifically, knowledgeable participants assumed naïve agents would primarily consider hypotheses close to the correct one. Finally, in Experiment 3, we aligned learners' beliefs to knowledgeable agents' expectations and showed learners the same examples selected by participants assigned to teach in Experiment 1. We found that these same examples were significantly more informative once learners' hypothesis spaces were constrained to match teachers' expectations. Our findings show that, in informal settings, adult pedagogical failures result from an inaccurate representation of what naïve learners believe is plausible and not an inability to select informative data in a rational way.

When it's not easy to do the right thing: Developmental changes in understanding cost drive evaluations of moral praiseworthiness

Recent work identified a shift in judgments of moral praiseworthiness that occurs late in development: adults recognize the virtue of moral actions that involve resolving an inner conflict between moral desires and selfish desires. Children, in contrast, praise agents who do the right thing in the absence of inner conflict. This finding stands in contrast with other work showing that children incorporate notions of cost and effort into their social reasoning. Using a modified version of Starmans and Bloom's (2016) vignettes, we show that understanding the virtue of costly moral action precedes understanding the virtue of resolving inner conflict. In two studies (N = 192 children, range = 4.00-9.95 years; and N = 193 adults), we contrasted a character who paid a personal cost (psychological in Study 1, physical in Study 2) to perform a moral action with another who acted morally without paying a cost. We found a developmental progression; 8- and 9-year-old children and adults recognized the praiseworthiness of moral actions that are psychologically or physically costly. Six- and 7-year-old children only recognized the praiseworthiness of moral actions that are physically costly, but not actions that are psychologically costly. Moreover, neither adults nor children inferred that paying a cost to act morally required having a moral desire or resolving inner conflict. These results suggest that both adults and children conceptualize obligation as a direct motivational force on actions. They further suggest that costly choice-a hallmark of moral agency-is implicated in judgments of praiseworthiness early in development.

Planning with Theory of Mind

Understanding Theory of Mind should begin with an analysis of the problems it solves. The traditional answer is that Theory of Mind is used for predicting others' thoughts and actions. However, the same Theory of Mind is also used for planning to change others' thoughts and actions. Planning requires that Theory of Mind consists of abstract structured causal representations and supports efficient search and selection from innumerable possible actions. Theory of Mind contrasts with less cognitively demanding alternatives: statistical predictive models of other people's actions, or model-free reinforcement of actions by their effects on other people. Theory of Mind is likely used to plan novel interventions and predict their effects, for example, in pedagogy, emotion regulation, and impression management.

Young children infer and manage what others think about them

We care about what others think of us and often try to present ourselves in a good light. What cognitive capacities underlie our ability to think (or even worry) about reputation, and how do these concerns manifest as strategic self-presentational behaviors? Even though the tendency to modify one's behaviors in the presence of others emerges early in life, the degree to which these behaviors reflect a rich understanding of what others think about the self has remained an open question. Bridging prior work on reputation management, communication, and theory of mind development in early childhood, here we investigate young children's ability to infer and revise others' mental representation of the self. Across four experiments, we find that 3- and 4-y-old children's decisions about to whom to communicate (Experiment 1), what to communicate (Experiments 2 and 3), and which joint activity to engage in with a partner (Experiment 4) are systematically influenced by the partner's observations of the children's own past performance. Children in these studies chose to present self-relevant information selectively and strategically when it could revise the partner's outdated, negative representation of the self. Extending research on children's ability to engage in informative communication, these results demonstrate the sophistication of early self-presentational behaviors: Even young children can draw rich inferences about what others think of them and communicate self-relevant information to revise these representations.

What makes us act together? On the cognitive models supporting humans’ decisions for joint action

We face tasks every day that we can solve alone but decide to solve together with others. When do we choose to act together vs. alone? How long do we persist in working together when doing so is difficult? Do we prefer to act together when times are uncertain? An open question in joint action research is under what conditions humans prefer to act together or alone to achieve a certain goal, and whether their preference is based on a utility calculus that takes into account the costs and benefits associated with individual and joint action alternatives. Research on cooperation reveals that frequent engagement in joint activities provides high survival benefits, as it allows individuals to achieve goals together that are otherwise unavailable. Yet, survival advantage does not wholly explain the reasons for human cooperative behavior. In fact, humans are motivated to cooperate even when it is not necessary to achieve an outcome. Research in cognitive science suggests that navigating the potential costs of joint actions is a challenge for humans, and that joint actions might provide individuals with rewards that go beyond the achievement of instrumental goals. We here address the influence of key factors on the decision to engage in joint action, such as the coordination costs arising when acting together compared to alone and the social and instrumental rewards expected when acting together compared to alone. Addressing these questions will provide critical insight for the design of cognitive models of human decisions for cooperation.

What Could Go Wrong: Adults and Children Calibrate Predictions and Explanations of Others' Actions Based on Relative Reward and Danger

When human adults make decisions (e.g., wearing a seat belt), we often consider the negative consequences that would ensue if our actions were to fail, even if we have never experienced such a failure. Do the same considerations guide our understanding of other people's decisions? In this paper, we investigated whether adults, who have many years of experience making such decisions, and 6- and 7-year-old children, who have less experience and are demonstrably worse at judging the consequences of their own actions, conceive others' actions as motivated both by reward (how good reaching one's intended goal would be), and by what we call "danger" (how badly one's action could end). In two pre-registered experiments, we tested whether adults and 6- and 7-year-old children tailor their predictions and explanations of an agent's action choices to the specific degree of danger and reward entailed by each action. Across four different tasks, we found that children and adults expected others to negatively appraise dangerous situations and minimize the danger of their actions. Children's and adults' judgments varied systematically in accord with both the degree of danger the agent faced and the value the agent placed on the goal state it aimed to achieve. However, children did not calibrate their inferences about how much an agent valued the goal state of a successful action in accord with the degree of danger the action entailed, and adults calibrated these inferences more weakly than inferences concerning the agent's future action choices. These results suggest that from childhood, people use a degree of danger and reward to make quantitative, fine-grained explanations and predictions about other people's behavior, consistent with computational models on theory of mind that contain continuous representations of other agents' action plans.

Human adults prefer to cooperate even when it is costly

Joint actions are cooperative activities where humans coordinate their actions to achieve individual and shared goals. While the motivation to engage in joint action is clear when a goal cannot be achieved by individuals alone, we asked whether humans are motivated to act together even when acting together is not necessary and implies incurring additional costs compared to individual goal achievement. Using a utility-based empirical approach, we investigated the extent of humans' preference for joint action over individual action, when the instrumental costs of performing joint actions outweigh the benefits. The results of five experiments showed that human adults have a stable preference for joint action, even if individual action is more effective to achieve a certain goal. We propose that such preferences can be understood as ascribing additional reward value to performing actions together.

Latent motives guide structure learning during adaptive social choice

Predicting the behaviour of others is an essential part of social cognition. Despite its ubiquity, social prediction poses a poorly understood generalization problem: we cannot assume that others will repeat past behaviour in new settings or that their future actions are entirely unrelated to the past. We demonstrate that humans solve this challenge using a structure learning mechanism that uncovers other people's latent, unobservable motives, such as greed and risk aversion. In four studies, participants (N = 501) predicted other players' decisions across four economic games, each with different social tensions (for example, Prisoner's Dilemma and Stag Hunt). Participants achieved accurate social prediction by learning the stable motivational structure underlying a player's changing actions across games. This motive-based abstraction enabled participants to attend to information diagnostic of the player's next move and disregard irrelevant contextual cues. Participants who successfully learned another's motives were more strategic in a subsequent competitive interaction with that player in entirely new contexts, reflecting that social structure learning supports adaptive social behaviour.

Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains

Anticipating the learning consequences of actions is crucial to plan efficient information seeking. Such a capacity is needed for learners to determine which actions are most likely to result in learning. Here, we tested the early ontogeny of the human capacity to anticipate the amount of learning gained from seeing. In study 1, we tested infants' capacity to anticipate the availability of sight. Fourteen-month-old infants (N = 72) were invited to search for a toy hidden inside a container. The participants were faster to attempt at opening a shutter when this action allowed them to see inside the container. Moreover, this effect was specifically observed when seeing inside the container was potentially useful to the participants' goals. Thus, infants anticipated the availability of sight, and they calibrated their information-seeking behaviors accordingly. In studies 2 and 3, we tested toddlers' capacity to anticipate whether data would be cognitively useful for their goals. Two-and-a-half-year-olds (N = 72) had to locate a target character hidden among distractors. The participants flipped the characters more often, and were comparatively faster to initiate this action when it yielded access to visual data allowing them to locate the target. Thus, toddlers planned their information-seeking behaviors by anticipating the cognitive utility of sight. In contrast, toddlers did not calibrate their behaviors to the cognitive usefulness of auditory data. These results suggest that cognitive models of learning guide toddlers' search for information. The early developmental onset of the capacity to anticipate future learning gains is crucial for active learning.

The effects of information utility and teachers' knowledge on evaluations of under-informative pedagogy across development

Teaching is a powerful way to transmit knowledge, but with this power comes a hazard: When teachers fail to select the best set of evidence for the learner, learners can be misled to draw inaccurate inferences. Evaluating others' failures as teachers, however, is a nontrivial problem; people may fail to be informative for different reasons, and not all failures are equally blameworthy. How do learners evaluate the quality of teachers, and what factors influence such evaluations? Here, we present a Bayesian model of teacher evaluation that considers the utility of a teacher's pedagogical sampling given their prior knowledge. In Experiment 1 (N=1168), we test the model predictions against adults' evaluations of a teacher who demonstrated all or a subset of the functions on a novel device. Consistent with the model predictions, participants' ratings integrated information about the number of functions taught, their values, as well as how much the teacher knew. Using a modified paradigm for children, Experiments 2 (N=48) and 3 (N=40) found that preschool-aged children (2a, 3) and adults (2b) make nuanced judgments of teacher quality that are well predicted by the model. However, after an unsuccessful attempt to replicate the results with preschoolers (Experiment 4, N=24), in Experiment 5 (N=24) we further investigate the development of teacher evaluation in a sample of seven- and eight-year-olds. These older children successfully distinguished teachers based on the amount and value of what was demonstrated, and their ability to evaluate omissions relative to the teacher's knowledge state was related to their tendency to spontaneously reference the teacher's knowledge when explaining their evaluations. In sum, our work illustrates how the human ability to learn from others supports not just learning about the world but also learning about the teachers themselves. By reasoning about others' informativeness, learners can evaluate others' teaching and make better learning decisions.

Can bifocal stance theory explain children's selectivity in active information transmission?

To shed light on the key premise of the bifocal stance theory (BST) that social learners flexibly take instrumental and ritual stances, we focus on developmental origins of child-led information transmission, or teaching, as a core social learning strategy. We highlight children's emerging selectivity in information transmission influenced by epistemic and social factors and call for systematic investigation of proposed stance-taking.

Peer tutoring of computer programming increases exploratory behavior in children

There is growing interest in teaching computer science and programming skills in schools. Here we investigated the efficacy of peer tutoring, which is known to be a useful educational resource in other domains but never before has been examined in such a core aspect of applied logical thinking in children. We compared (a) how children (N = 42, age range = 7 years 1 month to 8 years 4 months) learn computer programming from an adult versus learning from a peer and (b) the effect of teaching a peer versus simply revising what has been learned. Our results indicate that children taught by a peer showed comparable overall performance-a combination of accuracy and response times-to their classmates taught by an adult. However, there was a speed-accuracy trade-off, and peer-taught children showed more exploratory behavior, with shorter response times at the expense of lower accuracy. In contrast, no tutor effects (i.e., resulting from teaching a peer) were found. Thus, our results provide empirical evidence in support of peer tutoring as a way to help teach computer programming to children. This could contribute to the promotion of a widespread understanding of how computers operate and how to shape them, which is essential to our values of democracy, plurality, and freedom.

Orangutan mothers adjust their behaviour during food solicitations in a way that likely facilitates feeding skill acquisition in their offspring

Immature orangutans acquire their feeding skills over several years, via social and independent learning. So far, it has remained uninvestigated to what extent orangutan mothers are actively involved in this learning process. From a fitness point of view, it may be adaptive for mothers to facilitate their offspring's skill acquisition to make them reach nutritional independence faster. Food solicitations are potential means to social learning which, because of their interactive nature, allow to investigate the degree of active involvement of the mother. To investigate the role of food solicitation and the role of the mother in immatures' foraging skill acquisition, we analysed 1390 food solicitation events between 21 immature Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) and their mothers, collected over 13 years at the Suaq Balimbing orangutan population. We found that solicitation rates decreased with increasing age of the immatures and increased with increasing processing complexity of the food item. Mothers were more likely to share complex items and showed the highest likelihoods of sharing around the age at which immatures are learning most of their feeding skills. Our results indicate that immature Sumatran orangutans use food solicitation to acquire feeding skills. Furthermore, mothers flexibly adjust their behaviour in a way that likely facilitates their offspring's skill acquisition. We conclude that orangutan mothers have a more active role in the skill acquisition of their offspring than previously thought.

The computational challenge of social learning

The complex reward structure of the social world and the uncertainty endemic to social contexts poses a challenge for modeling. For example, during social interactions, the actions of one person influence the internal states of another. These social dependencies make it difficult to formalize social learning problems in a mathematically tractable way. While it is tempting to dispense with these complexities, they are a defining feature of social life. Because the structure of social interactions challenges the simplifying assumptions often made in models, they make an ideal testbed for computational models of cognition. By adopting a framework that embeds existing social knowledge into the model, we can go beyond explaining behaviors in laboratory tasks to explaining those observed in the wild.

Mini managers: Children strategically divide cognitive labor among collaborators, but with a self-serving bias

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016-2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self-serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third-party collaborative task did 5-year-olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self-serving bias.

Inferential social learning: cognitive foundations of human social learning and teaching

Social learning is often portrayed as a passive process of copying and trusting others. This view, however, does not fully capture what makes human social learning so powerful: social information is often 'curated' by helpful teachers. I argue that both learning from others (social learning) and helping others learn (teaching) can be characterized as probabilistic inferences guided by an intuitive understanding of how people think, plan, and act. Consistent with this idea, even young children draw rich inferences from evidence provided by others and generate informative evidence that helps others learn. By studying social learning and teaching through a common theoretical lens, inferential social learning provides an integrated account of how human cognition supports acquisition and communication of abstract knowledge.

How young children integrate information sources to infer the meaning of words

Before formal education begins, children typically acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words. This learning process requires the use of many different information sources in their social environment, including their current state of knowledge and the context in which they hear words used. How is this information integrated? We specify a developmental model according to which children consider information sources in an age-specific way and integrate them via Bayesian inference. This model accurately predicted 2-5-year-old children's word learning across a range of experimental conditions in which they had to integrate three information sources. Model comparison suggests that the central locus of development is an increased sensitivity to individual information sources, rather than changes in integration ability. This work presents a developmental theory of information integration during language learning and illustrates how formal models can be used to make a quantitative test of the predictive and explanatory power of competing theories.

Development of directed and random exploration in children

Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore-exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not all options can be experienced. By combining behavioral data with a computational model that decomposes search into similarity-based generalization, uncertainty-directed exploration, and random exploration, we map out developmental trajectories of generalization and exploration. The behavioral data show strong developmental differences in children's capability to exploit environmental structure, with performance and adaptiveness of sampling decisions increasing with age. Through model-based analyses, we disentangle different forms of exploration, finding signature of both uncertainty-directed and random exploration. The amount of random exploration strongly decreases as children get older, supporting the notion of a developmental "cooling off" process that modulates the randomness in sampling. However, even at the youngest age range, children do not solely rely on random exploration. Even as random exploration begins to taper off, children are actively seeking out options with high uncertainty in a goal-directed fashion, and using inductive inferences to generalize their experience to novel options. Our findings provide critical insights into the behavioral and computational principles underlying the developmental trajectory of learning and exploration.

Leaving a Choice for Others: Children's Evaluations of Considerate, Socially-Mindful Actions

People value those who act with others in mind even as they pursue their own goals. Across three studies (N = 566; 4- to 6-year-olds), we investigated children's developing understanding of such considerate, socially-mindful actions. By age 6, both U.S. and Chinese children positively evaluate a character who takes a snack for herself in a way that leaves a snack choice for others over a character who leaves no choice (Study 1), but only when the actors had alternative possible actions (Study 2) and when a clear beneficiary was present (Study 3). These results suggest an emerging ability to infer underlying social intentions from self-oriented actions, providing insights into the role of social-cognitive capacities versus culture-specific norms in children's moral evaluations.

An Illusion of Self-Sufficiency for Learning About Artifacts in Scaffolded Learners, But Not Observers

Two studies ask whether scaffolded children (n = 243, 5-6 years and 9-10 years) recognize that assistance is needed to learn to use complex artifacts. In Study 1, children were asked to learn to use a toy pantograph. While children recognized the need for assistance for indirect knowledge, 70% of scaffolded children claimed that they would have learned to use the artifact without assistance, even though 0% of children actually succeeded without assistance. In Study 2, this illusion of self-sufficiency was significantly attenuated when observing another learner being scaffolded. Learners may fail to appreciate artifacts' opacity because self-directed exploration can be partially informative, such that learning to use artifacts is typically scaffolded instead of taught explicitly.

Deciding What to Do: Developments in Children’s Spontaneous Monitoring of Cognitive Demands

How do children decide which tasks to take on? Understanding whether and when children begin to monitor cognitive demands to guide task selection is important as children gain increasing independence from adults in deciding which tasks to attempt themselves. In this article, we review evidence suggesting a developmental transition in children's consideration of cognitive demands when making choices about tasks: Although younger children are capable of monitoring cognitive demands to guide task selection, spontaneous monitoring of cognitive demands begins to emerge around 5-7 years. We describe frameworks for understanding when and why children begin to monitor cognitive demands, and propose additional factors that likely influence children's decisions to pursue or avoid cognitively demanding tasks.

The role of communication in acquisition, curation, and transmission of culture

Veissière et al.'s proposal aims to explain how cognition enables cultural learning, but fails to acknowledge a distinctively human behavior critical to this process: communication. Recent advances in developmental and computational cognitive science suggest that the social-cognitive capacities central to TTOM also support sophisticated yet remarkably early-emerging inferences and communicative behaviors that allow us to learn and share abstract knowledge.