Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people deal with ambiguity and indeterminacy of incoming information? The results of the two reported experiments indicate that both young children and adults tend to reduce ambiguity, systematically 'converting' noninformative propositions into more informative ones. Although young children and older participants use different strategies, high rates of conversions were found in both groups. These conversions seem to represent an adaptive cognitive constraint — a tendency to reduce ambiguity and to increase the informativeness of incoming information.