Do children’s flexible causal inferences promote more cre-ative causal discovery for observing adults? Inspired by a taskin which children are more likely to consider unconventionalcausal forms (Lucas, Bridgers, Griffiths, & Gopnik, 2014;Wente et al., 2019), we designed a new method in which child-adult pairs work together to solve a causal task and assessedthe relative influence of each member of the pair on the other’scausal inference. Consistent with previous research, childrenwere better than parents at learning the unusual conjunctive re-lationship, suggesting that children make more flexible causalinferences than adults. Our research also revealed a surpris-ing and new result – that observing a child explore broadlyhelped parents to be more flexible and open-minded in theircausal learning. In contrast, a child observing an adult’s ex-ploratory interventions had no negative consequence on thechild’s ability to infer the correct relation. Follow-up exper-iments explored the degree to which this child-led bootstrap-ping for adults was due to the particular exploratory evidencegenerated by the child during play, or merely the presence ofa child. Results suggest that both factors may play a role inshaping adult’s causal inferences.

Prior findings are mixed regarding the extent to which children understand others' effort in early childhood. Especially, little is known about how character effort impacts children's selective attention and learning. This study examined preschoolers' visual attention to and learning from two on-screen characters: One character exerting high effort with low efficiency and another character exerting low effort with high efficiency in solving problems successfully. Children between 3.5 and 6.5 years of age (N = 70) watched a video of the two on-screen characters successfully solving problems. Children's eye movements were recorded during viewing. Each of the two on-screen characters consistently displayed either high effort/low efficiency or low effort/high efficiency to solve four problems (familiarization). For the final problem (testing), the two characters exerted the same level of effort as each other and used unique solutions to solve the problem. Children then solved the final problem themselves using real objects. Children could selectively use either character's solution demonstrated in the video. Lastly, children explicitly judged how good the characters were at solving problems. Younger children were more likely to use the solution demonstrated by the character with high effort/low efficiency, whereas older children were more likely to use the solution provided by another character with low effort/high efficiency. Younger children allocated more attention to the high effort/low efficiency character than the low effort/high efficiency character, but this pattern was modified by age such that children's gaze to the low effort/high efficiency character increased with age. Children's explicit credibility judgments did not differ by character or child age. The findings are discussed with respect to preschoolers' understanding of effort and implications for children's learning from screen media.

Despite having sophisticated causal reasoning skills, there are a variety of cases in which adult learners consistently ignorethe available evidence and make an incorrect inference. Here, we focus on a specific case in which adults fail to inferand apply a conjunctive causal rule (Lucas et al., 2014), and examine two explanations for this failure. In Experiment1, we manipulate information about the probabilistic nature of the events to test whether adults failure results from anendorsement of noisy relations. In Experiment 2, we manipulate the physical design of the causal system to test analternative account: that this phenomenon is due to a failure to consider the correct, conjunctive hypothesis. Takentogether, our results suggest that failures to learn the conjunctive rule may not be entirely due to a noisy prior that affordsdiscounting of the evidence, but instead results from a failure to generate the relevant hypothesis.

Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children’s speech, pro- viding a means by which young learners can rapidly gain infor- mation about the world. Although past work demonstrates that children are sensitive to the knowledge state of potential infor- mants (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005), less work has explored whether children spontaneously direct questions to adults over other children (who are less likely to be knowledgeable), and in particular if adult-directed questions focus on content that is more likely to support general learning. We recorded in- dividual children’s spontaneous speech in 40-minute sessions during their preschool day; for every production we coded whether the speech was directed towards an adult, another child, or was stated to self. Our results (N = 30, totaling 2,232 utterances) showed that questions took up a greater proportion of children’s adult-directed speech as compared to the pro- portion of questions in child-directed and self-directed speech. Furthermore, although children asked many kinds of questions (including conversational clarifications, specific information questions, and questions intended for general learning), chil- dren more frequently asked the questions intended for learning when they spoke to adults than to the other groups. Analysis revealed a developmental effect, with results strongest for the older preschoolers. Our findings suggest that children discrim- inately choose ”what” and ”whom” to ask in daily conversa- tions, and this ability improves over the course of development.