Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often rely on knowledgeable teachers to help them learn. Sometimes, this teaching is direct: teachers provide instructions, examples, demonstrations, or feedback. But other times, teaching is more subtle: teachers construct the physical environment in which a learner explores. In the present research, we investigate this more subtle form of teaching in an artificial grid-based learning environment. How do people construct the physical environment to teach, and how does the (pedagogical) design of the physical environment affect people's learning? Study 1 shows that people pursue multiple approaches to pedagogical environment design. Study 2 shows that learners make systematic, often accurate inferences from pedagogically designed environments, even in the absence of exploration. Together, these studies add to our understanding of the myriad ways in which experts communicate their knowledge to novices—a capacity that is part of what makes human intelligence unique.