Young children consider the expected utility of others’ learning to decide what to teach
Sophie Bridgers, Julian Jara‐Ettinger, Hyowon Gweon · 2018
Direct instruction facilitates learning without the costs of exploration, yet teachers must be selective because not everything can nor needs to be taught. How do we decide what to teach, and what to leave for learners to discover? Here we investigate the cognitive underpinnings of the human ability to prioritise what to teach. We present a computational model that decides what to teach by maximising the learner's expected utility of learning from instruction and from exploration, and show that children (age 5-7) make decisions that are consistent with the model's predictions (i.e., minimising the learner's costs and maximising the rewards). Children flexibly considered either the learner's utility or their own depending on the context and even considered costs they had not personally experienced to decide what to teach. These results suggest that utility-based reasoning may play an important role in curating cultural knowledge by supporting selective transmission of high-utility information.