Children engage in cultural knowledge exchange by actively sharing what they know with conspecifics– and do so selectively with respect to information type and its recipients. Previous research suggests that from preschool age, children tend to share information that is generalisable to a kind (“dogs have fur”), rather than specific (“this dog has spots”). However, the ontogeny of such generalisability preference and its systematic investigations are lacking. We aimed to probe this question further.

In two experimental studies, children aged 2 (N = 49) and 6-9 (N = 144) were presented with novel information and then had an opportunity to share it with a naïve learner. We tested if children showed a preference for transmitting generalisable over specific information. In Study 1, such information was presented though action outcomes on novel objects and 2-year-olds did not display the hypothesised preference. In four experiments comprising Study 2, we found that older children selectively shared generalisable facts when those were of neutral nature, as well as health-related, but not when it was in a potentially implicitly threatening context.

These results advance our understanding of children’s selective sharing of generalisable knowledge by uncovering the limits in early childhood and in certain learning contexts.