Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A set of fundamental principles governs our reasoning about agents since infancy. Past research has shown that adults are surprised when they observe apparent violations of these principles, which might prime them to learn from the violations and update their beliefs. In the present experiments, we demonstrate that adults can revise their beliefs about these principles in a specific, virtual world when they observe multiple pieces of counterevidence, and generalize their revised beliefs to new agents in the same environment. We discuss these findings together with the findings of a similar study with preschoolers, and we suggest future directions for this line of research.