Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examines 205 4- to 12-year-old children's beliefs about the abilities of three technological informants (the internet as a whole, Google search, and Amazon's Alexa smart speaker) to answer questions about celebrity and non-celebrity people and near future and far future events. The results indicate that, with increasing age, children increasingly indicate that these sources can accurately answer questions about near future events and celebrities but not about non-celebrities or far future events. Although children increasingly indicate that these sources cannot tell them about everyday people, the oldest children in the sample believe that the internet is more likely to be able to tell you about non-celebrities than Alexa or a Google search. Children's understanding of the capacities of technology change with age and information type, perhaps reflecting changes in children's experiences online. Implications for children's learning and understanding of privacy are discussed.