Learning from others and teaching others: Children's inferences and evaluations in social contexts

What we know about the world is much more than the sum of our direct experience with it. We draw rich, abstract inductive inferences that go beyond what we can observe, and what we observe is often mediated by, or even originates from, representations of the world that reside in other people's minds. In this talk, I will present studies with infants and young children that speak to the inferential processes and the representations that underlie our ability to learn from others and share what we know with others. Even early in life, human learners can draw rational inferences from minimal statistical evidence, flexibly modulating their inferences depending on how evidence is sampled by others. Children can also evaluate informants based on an intuitive understanding of how agents ought to sample information. Furthermore, children consider others' goals and epistemic states to decide what and how much information to provide as teachers. Monitoring and assessing others' intent and knowledge in learning and teaching may involve our capacity to reason about other people's minds. I will end by discussing how combinations of different methodological approaches can help us better understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms that allow us to learn from others and share what we know in social contexts.

Speaker: Hyowon Gweon, Stanford