Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children decide when to fact-check a claim? In two studies and a simulation, we show that children use environmental cues about informational reliability to rationally adapt their information seeking to enable the efficient detection of misinformation. In Study 1, children exposed to an environment containing some misinformation (as opposed to all true information) sampled more evidence before verifying a test claim in a novel domain. In Study 2, children showed a graded sensitivity to environmental reliability: information seeking increased linearly with the proportion of false statements heard during exposure. Additionally, these statements were presented as online search results, which demonstrated that children make sophisticated inferences about their informational environments, beyond speaker-specific cues, to adjust their skepticism toward new information. These results further emphasize the importance of considering the environmental context of learning when developing interventions to promote healthy skepticism and lifelong learning.