Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite the unpredictable and ubiquitous nature of noise in the natural acoustic environment, most children still manage to ex- tract the linguistic, cognitive, and social information needed to engage with their world. This is no small feat. We examined what strategies children use to navigate different acoustic environments. One possibility we test is that children can select acoustic contexts that are consistent with particular goals. In Experiment 1, we presented preschool children with a set of auditory stimuli, meant to approximate various acoustic environments, and activity goals to complete within those environments. Children integrated auditory information with goals to select the best environment. To assess the flexibility of children’s decision-making, Experiment 2 built on this framework by replacing familiar activity goals with relatively less familiar ones. In preliminary data, adults and preschoolers reliably evaluated acoustic environments that best matched these less familiar activities, providing evidence for flexible reasoning about goal-consistent environments.