Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore whether children’s strategies on a causal learningtask show a bias observed in adults towards “exploitative” hy-pothesis revision. Adults and children (ages 4–6) were pre-sented with evidence which initially seemed to conform to asimple, salient rule (e.g. blue blocks activate a machine), butthen encountered evidence that violated this rule. The truerule in the “near” condition was more complex, but could bereached through iterative revision of the salient rule, while inthe “distant” condition, the true rule was comparatively sim-ple, but incremental revision could not yield the true rule. Par-ticipants then predicted the behaviour of a set of new blocks.Adults performed better in the near condition, while in the dis-tant condition adults did not appear to revise their initial hy-pothesis significantly. Unlike adults, children’s overall perfor-mance in both conditions was similar, while condition differ-ences may reflect a broader search for alternative solutions.