Motivated by computational analyses, we look at how teaching affects exploration and discovery. In Experiment 1, we investigated children’s exploratory play after an adult pedagogically demonstrated a function of a toy, after an interrupted pedagogical demonstration, after a naïve adult demonstrated the function, and at baseline. Preschoolers in the pedagogical condition focused almost exclusively on the target function; by contrast, children in the other conditions explored broadly. In Experiment 2, we show that children restrict their exploration both after direct instruction to themselves and after overhearing direct instruction given to another child; they do not show this constraint after observing direct instruction given to an adult or after observing a non-pedagogical intentional action. We discuss these findings as the result of rational inductive biases. In pedagogical contexts, a teacher’s failure to provide evidence for additional functions provides evidence for their absence; such contexts generalize from child to child (because children are likely to have comparable states of knowledge) but not from adult to child. Thus, pedagogy promotes efficient learning but at a cost: children are less likely to

Previous work showed that people‟s causal judgments are modeled better as estimates of the probability that a causal relationship exists (a qualitative inference) than as estimates of the strength of that relationship (a quantitative inference). Here, using a novel task, we present experimental evidence in support of the importance of qualitative causal inference. Our findings cannot be explained through the use of parameter estimation and related quantitative inference. These findings suggest the role of qualitative inference in causal reasoning has been understudied despite its unique role in cognition. Further, we suggest these findings open interesting questions about the role of qualitative inference in many domains.