Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans have an intuitive sense of what others know and how they learned it. These expectations are often latent, but violating them can elicit surprise and curiosity (e.g., a stranger knowing a lot about you). Here we investigate the development of epistemic expectations by measuring young children's sensitivity to such violations. First, parents reported that children typically respond to violations of epistemic expectations by age 4 (Exp.1). In naturalistic dialogue experiments with 4- and 5-year-olds, children were more likely to display surprised expressions and report being surprised when the experimenter’s parent knew personal information about them than when their own parent did (Exp.2). However, children showed an opposite pattern when these people knew information about the experimenter’s sibling (Exp.3). Together, these results suggest preschool-aged children are sensitive to others' access to information and readily detect violations of their epistemic expectations in casual conversation.