As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge "in the head," even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.

Three studies explored the abilities of 205 children (5–11 years) and 74 adults (18–72 years) to distinguish directly vs. indirectly acquired information in a scenario where an individual grew up in isolation from human culture. Directly acquired information is knowledge acquired through first-hand experience. Indirectly acquired information is knowledge that requires input from others. All children distinguished directly from indirectly acquired knowledge (Studies 1–3), even when the indirectly acquired knowledge was highly familiar (Study 2). All children also distinguished difficult-to-acquire direct knowledge from simple-to-acquire direct knowledge (Study 3). The major developmental change was the increasing ability to completely rule out indirect knowledge as possible for an isolated individual to acquire.

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Previous research suggests that preschoolers struggle with understanding abstract relations and with reasoning by analogy. Four experiments find, in contrast, that 3-and 4-year-olds (N = 168) are surprisingly adept at relational and analogical reasoning within a causal context. In earlier studies preschoolers routinely favored images that share thematic or perceptual commonalities with a target image (object matches) over choices that match the target along abstract relations (relational matches). The present studies embed such choice tasks within a causeand-effect framework. Without causal framing, preschoolers strongly favor object matches, replicating the results of previous studies. But with causal framing, preschoolers succeed at analogical transfer (i.e., choose relational matches). These findings suggest that causal framing facilitates early analogical reasoning. We gratefully acknowledge the Bezos Family Foundation for funding this research. We thank Rosie Aboody,

The ability to consider multiple possibilities forms the basis for a wide variety of human-unique cognitive capacities. When does this skill develop? Previous studies have narrowly focused on children's ability to prepare for incompatible future outcomes. Here, we investigate this capacity in a causal learning context. Adults (N = 109) and 18-to 30-month olds (N = 104) observed evidence that was consistent with two hypotheses, each occupying a different level of abstraction (individual vs. relational causation). Results suggest that adults and toddlers identified multiple candidate causes for an effect, held these possibilities in mind, and flexibly applied the appropriate hypothesis to inform subsequent inferences. These findings challenge previous suggestions that the ability to consider multiple alternatives does not emerge until much later in development.