All students of cognitive development agree that the central questions in development are 1) specifying the initial state of a human infant, 2) specifying the final state of development for a human adult, and 3) specifying how to get from the initial state to the final state. Then academic disputes ensue. Cognitive developmental psychologists are roughly divided into two camps: those who are more or less nativists and those who are more or less empiricists. Some psychologists do not like these terms, and some alternatives are “those who believe in innate knowledge ” and “those who believe in learning, ” or “those who believed in initial conceptual knowledge ” and “those who believe in initial perceptual capabilities. ” This division is also correlated with whether a researcher believes in domain specificity or not: nativists tend to argue for domain-specific knowledge (even at the beginning of development) and domain-specific learning mechanisms; empiricists tend to argue for domain-general learning mechanisms that may result in domain-specific knowledge some years into development (for some representative explications of these views, see Carey &

Two studies compared children’s attention to sample composition—whether a sample provides a diverse representation of a category of interest—during teacher-led and learner-driven learning contexts. In Study 1 (N = 48), 5-year-olds attended to sample composition to make inferences about biological properties only when samples were presented by a knowledgeable teacher. In contrast, adults attended to sample composition in both teacher-led and learner-driven contexts. In Study 2 (N = 51), 6-year-olds chose to create diverse samples to teach information about biological kinds to another child, but not to discover new information for themselves, whereas adults chose to create diverse samples for both teaching and information discovery. Results suggest that how children approach the interpretation and selection of evidence varies depending on whether learning occurs in pedagogical or non-pedagogical contexts. Sample Composition 3 Much of human learning involves extending information obtained from limited samples to inform general expectations about the world. Some of this learning occurs in pedagogical contexts, in which one person, the teacher, knows some target information that another person, the learner, does not (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical learning does not require a formal