Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans have an intuitive sense of how to help and informothers even in the absence of a specific request. How do weachieve this? Here we propose that even young children canreason about others’ expected costs and rewards to flexiblydecide what is best for others. We asked children to chooseone of two toys to teach to another agent while systematicallyvarying the relative costs and rewards of discovering each toy’sfunctions. Children’s choices were consistent with the predic-tions of a computational model that maximizes others’ utilitiesby minimizing their expected costs and maximizing their ex-pected rewards. These results suggest that even early in life,children draw rational inferences about others’ costs and ben-efits, and choose to communicate information that maximizestheir utilities.