Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to recognize and evaluate reliable informants is acritical skill for effective social learning. Building on priorwork showing children’s sensitivity to informants who omitrelevant information, here we asked whether children’s teacherevaluations incorporate information about 1) the epistemicstate of the teacher, and 2) the amount and value of informationtaught. Preschool-aged children rated informants who taughtlearners about a novel toy with four functions; we systemat-ically varied the number and value of functions the teachersknew and taught. Our results indicate that children exoner-ated unintentional omissions of teachers who had incompleteknowledge, and provided graded ratings based on the degree ofomission. These findings are consistent with the predictions ofprior computational work, and suggest that the ability to reasonabout others’ knowledge plays an important role in children’sinferences about others’ efficacy as informants.