Katie Kimura

Title: Learning and then re-learning: Belief revision in young children

Learning is a complex process that requires integrating new evidence with existing beliefs. This task is relatively straightforward when the evidence is consistent with and thus supported by existing beliefs. It becomes less clear, however, when the evidence is inconsistent—that is, when the evidence directly conflicts with one’s prior knowledge. Will learners revise their beliefs to reflect the new evidence or will they instead maintain their existing beliefs, perhaps ignoring the conflicting data as anomalous? In this talk, I will present two studies that being to address this question—one completed and one ongoing—that demonstrate young children’s remarkable ability to normatively revise their higher-order beliefs by attending to both the weight of their initial belief and the strength of the counterevidence. Taken together, these studies reveal how children are rational revisionists of their abstract, higher-order beliefs.

Yuan Meng