Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research has found that when children or adults attemptto explain novel observations in the course of learning,they are more likely to discover patterns that support idealexplanations: explanations that are maximally simple andbroad. However, not all learning contexts support suchexplanations. Can explaining facilitate discoverynonetheless? We present a study in which participantswere tasked with discovering a rule governing theclassification of items, where the items were consistenttwo non-ideal rules: one correctly classified 66% of cases,the other 83%. We find that when there is no ideal rule tobe discovered (i.e., no 100% rule), participants promptedto explain are better than control participants atdiscovering the best available rule (i.e., the 83% rule).This supports the idea that seeking ideal explanations canbe beneficial in a non-ideal world because the pursuit ofan ideal explanation can facilitate the discovery ofimperfect patterns along the way.