Abstract
<p>People’s actions often leave physical traces (e.g., footprints in the mud, a dirty mug) that adults can use to reconstruct what another person was doing, what their goals were, and what they knew. Here we test whether children can make these inferences in cases that require going beyond a direct mapping from traces to actions, focusing on reasoning about a conspicuous absence of evidence, and relying on an agent’s preferences to interpret physical traces that are otherwise ambiguous. In Experiment 1, five- and six-year-olds inferred that an agent had lifted a rock-filled bowl or a rice-filled bowl when they saw the corresponding physical trace (i.e., rocks or rice spilled on the table). Critically, when no traces were left behind, children also inferred that the agent had lifted the rock-filled bowl, suggesting they understood that this action was less likely to produce observable evidence. Experiments 2 and 3 then show that children can integrate the agent’s preferences when the physical evidence alone does not reveal what happened. Our results suggest that, by age five, children begin to draw social inferences from indirect evidence by integrating physical and social reasoning.</p>