The ability to decide whether, when and how to try is central to human learning. We
investigated whether infants can make rational inferences about when and how to try on a
novel problem-solving task. After learning from an adult that the task was either easy, difficult
or impossible to solve, infants varied in whether, when and how they tried based on the type
of social evidence that they received and on their own ongoing experience with the task.
Specifically, infants formed expectations about the task, their own ability to solve the task …