Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Natural pedagogy emerges early in development (Knudsen &Liszkowski, 2012), but good teaching requires presenting ev-idence specific to learners’ knowledge (Shafto, Goodman, &Griffiths, 2014). How might the development of Theory ofMind (ToM) relate to the ability to select pedagogical evi-dence? We present a training study in which we investigatedthe link between preschool-aged children’s false-belief under-standing and their ability to select evidence for teaching. Ourresults suggest that children with more advanced ToM abili-ties were better evidence selectors, even when controlling foreffects of age and numerical conservation abilities. We alsofound that children who improved more in false-belief under-standing from pre- to post-test performed better on the peda-gogical tasks over the course of the training. Finally, we reporttentative evidence for a link between the pedagogical train-ing and improvements in ToM. Our findings suggest importantconnections between ToM and evidential reasoning in naturalpedagogy in early childhood.