Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to reason about task difficulty is critical for manyreal-world decisions. Building on prior work on preschoolers’inferences about the difficulty of novel physical tasks (Gweonet al., 2017), here we ask whether this ability further supportsrational allocation of effort in collaborative and individual con-texts. When an agent could offer help to someone who had tocomplete a hard task versus someone who had to complete aneasy task, adults and preschoolers offered help with the hardertask (Collaborative Goal). When an agent could choose tocomplete a hard task or an easy task to achieve the same out-come, adults and preschoolers preferentially chose the easiertask (Individual Goal). In the absence of explicit informationabout the relative difficulty of tasks, even young children in-ferred the expected difficulty of tasks and appropriately allo-cated effort across agents and across tasks. Beyond expectingagents to choose actions that maximize their own utility in in-dividual contexts, our results show that even preschool-agedchildren readily understand how deviating from this choice canbe desirable in cooperative contexts.