Navigating pedagogy: Children’s developing capacities for learning from pedagogical interactions

•Pedagogical cues guide inferences about generalizability.•But children must learn to navigate pedagogical interactions to do so.•Younger children might have a more global sense of pedagogical interactions.•Two experiments investigate development of this ability and its impact on inductive inference.•Preschoolers are in the process of learning to be selective in social learning.

Young children can use cues that an adult is pedagogically providing information for their benefit to evaluate its importance and generalizability. But to use pedagogical actions to guide learning, children must learn to navigate ongoing pedagogical interactions, identifying which specific actions within an overarching context are in fact meant as pedagogical. In two experiments (N = 120) we illustrate that 3-year-old struggle with this ability, failing to distinguish pedagogical from merely intentional actions unless the endpoints of a pedagogical interaction were clearly demarked. These results shed light on the development of this powerful learning mechanism for facilitating inductive inference.