Young children are epistemically vigilant, attending to the reliability, expertise, and confidence of their informants and the prior probability and verifiability of their claims. But the pre-eminent requirement of any hypothesis is that it provides a potential solution to the question at hand. Given questions with no known answer, the ability to selectively adopt new, unverified, speculative proposals may be critical to learning. This study explores when people might reasonably reject known facts in favor of unverified conjectures. Across four experiments, when conjectures answer questions that available facts do not, both adults (n = 48) and children (4.0–7.9 years, n = 241, of diverse race and ethnicity) prefer the conjectures, even when the conjectures are preceded by uncertainty markers or explicitly violate prior expectations.

中文翻译：

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孩子们选择性地支持投机猜想

幼儿在认知上保持警惕，注意他们的线人的可靠性、专业知识和信心，以及他们的主张的先验概率和可验证性。但任何假设的首要要求是它为手头的问题提供了潜在的解决方案。给定没有已知答案的问题，有选择地采用新的、未经验证的推测性建议的能力可能对学习至关重要。本研究探讨了人们何时可以合理地拒绝已知事实而支持未经证实的猜想。在四个实验中，当猜想回答可用事实不能回答的问题时，成人（n  = 48）和儿童（4.0-7.9 岁，n = 241，不同种族和民族）更喜欢猜想，即使猜想前面有不确定性标记或明确违反了先前的预期。