Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Developmental psychologists have often turned to children to clarify understanding of functional and mechanistic cognition. Here, we investigate children's epistemic inferences of function – what a thing is for – and mechanism – how a thing works. Children, like adults, believe a mechanism-knower knows more than a function-knower (Study 1). Yet, unlike adults, children do not expect that a mechanism-knower is also more likely to know function than a function-knower is to know mechanism (Study 2). Children's experience of learning function and mechanism of complex systems sheds light on this asymmetry; Children who are taught just mechanism can infer the complementary function, but, interestingly, children who are taught just function can likewise infer the complementary mechanism (Study 3). This paper considers the nature of children's epistemic intuitions and whether those beliefs are reflective of children's learning experience.