Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Evidence is typically consistent with more than one hypothesis.How do we decide which hypothesis to pursue (e.g., to subjectto further consideration and testing)? Research has shown thatexplanatory considerations play an important role in learningand inference: we tend to seek and favor hypotheses thatoffer good explanations for the evidence we invoke them toexplain. Here we report three studies testing the proposal thatexplanatory considerations similarly inform decisions concern-ing pursuit. We find that ratings of explanatory goodness predictpursuit (though to a lesser extent than they predict belief), andthat these effects hold after adjusting for subjective probability.These findings contribute to a growing body of work suggestingan important role for explanatory considerations in shapinginquiry.