Investigating the role of belief strength in children’s intuitive theory of belief updating

Prior work has shown that young children expect others to be rational actors—but do they also expect others to be rational believers? Our work aims to investigate intuitive initiative theories of belief revision in children ages 4-8. I will report two studies in which we focus on whether children understand the role of prior belief strength in belief updating: whether they conceive of prior strength as a mental constraint that shapes their modal judgments and predictions. In Study 1, we explore whether children judge it to be more possible, and more difficult, to change a strongly held belief than a weakly held one, and look at their explanations for others’ belief change. In Study 2, we test whether children use information about prior belief strength to inform their predictions of how a character will update their belief in response to counterevidence.

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