Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to reason about the difficulty of novel tasks is criti-cal for many real-world decisions. To decide whether to tacklea task or how to divide labor across people, we must estimatethe difficulty of the goal in the absence of prior experience.Here we examine adults’ and preschoolers’ inferences aboutthe difficulty of simple block-building tasks. Exp.1 first estab-lished that building time is a useful proxy for difficulty. Exp.2asked participants to view the initial and final states of variousblock-building tasks and judge their relative difficulty. Whileadults were near-ceiling on all trials, children showed varyinglevels of performance depending on the nature of the dimen-sions that varied across structures. Exp. 3 replicated the pat-tern. These results suggest that children can reverse-engineerthe process of goal-directed actions to infer the relative diffi-culty of novel tasks, although their ability to incorporate morenuanced factors may continue to develop.