Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Abstract: When inferring the extent of others’ knowledgefrom samples of what they know, certain kinds of samplesimply richer content. One candidate kind is knowledge ofcausal mechanism. In the current study, we investigatewhether children and adults think that knowledge aboutmechanism generalizes more broadly than non-mechanisticfactual knowledge. We find an early-emerging assumptionthat mechanistic knowledge about a basic level categoryimplies greater knowledge about a superordinate category,compared to factual knowledge about the same basic levelcategory. Even young children have a sophisticated sense ofhow causal mechanisms generalize across categories, despitepossessing little mechanistic knowledge themselves. Theseintuitions likely support the epistemic inferences we makefrom early childhood onward.