Preschool children’s preference for knowledgeable agents over
ignorant and inaccurate agents (Sabbagh & Baldwin, 2001;
Koenig & Harris, 2005; Rakoczy et al., 2015), is generally
interpreted as epistemic vigilance. However, Kushnir and
Koenig (2017) recently found that without a contrasting
accurate agent, preschoolers will learn new information from
an agent who professed ignorance, but not from one who was
inaccurate. Employing a two-speaker design contrasting an
agent who professed ignorance about familiar object labels
with a speaker whose knowledge state was not revealed, we
found that preschoolers (N = 41; 3.50-4.89 years, M = 4.08
years) avoided requesting and endorsing novel information
from the ignorant agent in the same domain as her previous
ignorance (i.e., labels). In different domains, however, (i.e.
novel function learning, resource sharing, etc.) they were at
chance in choosing the ignorant agent. This suggests that
preschoolers’ view of ignorance is situational, rather than
uniformly negative.