Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present study examined the role of negative evidence on children's inductive generalizations. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N=98) were asked to generalize from samples with negative evidence and samples with positive evidence that were selected either deliberately or incidentally. Children in all three age groups made a higher rate of generalizations from samples that included negative evidence than from samples that included positive evidence, but only when evidence was described as having been selected deliberately by the experimenter. Furthermore, there were developmental differences in the scope of generalizations such that deliberate sampling elicited a higher rate of generalizations among older children compared to younger children. These results are discussed in light of other work on inductive reasoning that emphasizes the role of dyadic factors on generalization, such as the expectation that informants intend to share relevant information.