Across two experiments, an adult informant presented 220 preschoolers (34–71 months of age) with either a correct claim or an incorrect claim about how to activate a music box by using one of two toy figures. Children were then prompted to explore the figures and to discover whether the informant’s claim was correct or incorrect. Children who discovered the claim to be incorrect no longer endorsed it. Moreover, their predictions regarding a new figure’s ability to activate the music box were clearly affected by the reliability of the informant’s prior claim. Thus, children reassess an informant’s incorrect claim about an object in light of later empirical evidence and transfer their conclusions regarding the validity of that claim to subsequent objects.

在两次实验中，一名成年线人向 220 名学龄前儿童（34-71 个月大）提出了关于如何使用两个玩具人偶之一激活音乐盒的正确声明或错误声明。然后，孩子们被提示探索这些数字，并发现线人的说法是正确还是不正确。发现声称不正确的儿童不再认可它。此外，他们对新人物激活音乐盒能力的预测显然受到线人先前声明的可靠性的影响。因此，儿童根据后来的经验证据重新评估线人对某个对象的错误主张，并将他们关于该主张有效性的结论转移到后续对象。