Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do learners’ expectations about teachers’ informativenessshape subsequent learning? Here, we suggest that expecta-tions about teaching style may constrain learning through in-ferences over (1) the amount of information to be learned, and(2) the importance of the demonstrated information. Adult be-havioral data from two experiments conform with our predic-tions: Given a single pedagogical demonstration, as teacherswere expected to share less information, adults inferred thatthere should be more additional information to be learned, andgreater importance of the demonstrated information. Model-ing of these results sheds insight into how adults may be mak-ing these inferences, and provides a framework with which wemay predict future results of children’s exploration followingpedagogical demonstrations from different teachers.