Models of pedagogy highlight the reciprocal reasoning underlying learner-teacher interactions, including that learners' inferences should be shaped by what they believe a teacher knows about them. Yet, little is known about how this influences learning, despite the fact that even young children make rapid inferences about teaching from sparse data. In the current work, six- to eight-year-olds' performance on a picture-matching game was either overestimated, underestimated, or accurately represented by a confederate (the "Teacher"), who then presented three new matching games of varying assessed difficulty (too easy, too hard, just right). A simple model of this problem predicts that while children should follow the recommendation of an accurate Teacher, learners should choose easier games when the Teacher overestimated their abilities, and harder games when she underestimated them. Results from our experiment support these predictions, providing insight into children’s ability to consider teachers’ knowledge when learning from pedagogy.

Decision-making can be automatic (“rote”) or on-the-fly (“reflective”). Are people sensitive to whether others are behaving rotely or reflectively? The rote-versus-reflective inference may be particularly relevant when learning from others: good teachers should be actively considering the learner’s needs. When teachers rely on rote systems, this may “break” the mental state recursion that facilitates learning from pedagogy. This study takes a first step in investigating learning and inference when teachers use rote-versus-reflective reasoning, using uniqueness of feedback as a cue to reflectivity. Adult participants viewed videos of teachers providing either identical, similar, or unique feedback to three different groups of students; participants evaluated that teacher along several metrics. Consistent with our predictions, rote teachers were evaluated as poorer informants than reflective teachers, and students paired with rote teachers were expected to learn less. These results are the first to demonstrate sensitivity to, and impact from, inferences about others’ rote-versus-reflective behaviors.

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.

Childrens exploration is driven by opportunities for learning, and past research has suggested rational explanations for howearly home experiences may affect childrens active learning (Yu et al., 2020) or willingness to wait for rewards (Kidd etal., 2013). However, less work has characterized the relationship between childrens environmental contexts and play. Wepooled exploratory play data from past experiments in our lab (M(age)=56mos; N=278), and correlated play behavior withmedian income and education in the childs home zipcode. Children from lower SES areas played significantly longer,more variably, and spent a lower proportion of time focusing on demonstrated functions which traded off with lengthand variability of play exclusively for children from lower educated areas. Importantly, home income is confounded withdaycare income; future work will disentangle distinct influences of family SES and daycare environment. This work layscritical groundwork for understanding early active learning across developmental contexts.

The ability to recognize and evaluate reliable informants is acritical skill for effective social learning. Building on priorwork showing children’s sensitivity to informants who omitrelevant information, here we asked whether children’s teacherevaluations incorporate information about 1) the epistemicstate of the teacher, and 2) the amount and value of informationtaught. Preschool-aged children rated informants who taughtlearners about a novel toy with four functions; we systemat-ically varied the number and value of functions the teachersknew and taught. Our results indicate that children exoner-ated unintentional omissions of teachers who had incompleteknowledge, and provided graded ratings based on the degree ofomission. These findings are consistent with the predictions ofprior computational work, and suggest that the ability to reasonabout others’ knowledge plays an important role in children’sinferences about others’ efficacy as informants.

What constitutes good teaching, and what factors do learners consider when evaluating teachers? Prior developmental work suggests that even young children accurately recognize and evaluate under-informativeness. Building on prior work, we propose a Bayesian model of teacher evaluation that infers the teacher’s quality from how carefully he selected demonstrations given what he knew. We test the predictions of our model across 15 conditions in which participants saw a teacher who demonstrated all or a subset of functions of a novel device and rated his helpfulness. Our results suggest that human adults seamlessly integrate information about the number of functions taught, their values, as well as what the teacher knew, to make nuanced judgments about the quality of teaching; the quantitative pattern is well predicted by our model

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.