Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans are remarkable learners. Decades of research have shown that, from early in life, children efficiently acquire knowledge through their exploration (Bonawitz et al., 2012; Giron et al., 2023; Meder et al., 2021; Ruggeri et al., 2019; Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007) and social input (Harris & Corriveau, 2011; Ronfard et al., 2018). However, this body of work has largely focused on how children learn about the external world. The current symposium highlights an equally important, but underexplored, and perhaps even more challenging learning problem: How do humans learn about the internal world (i.e., themselves)? By bringing together cognitive, computational, and developmental perspectives, this symposium examines how young children direct their learning abilities inward to infer who they are and what they are capable of.