Could it be that children lacked the knowledge of how to determine whether or not the figurines worked, or believed they were not allowed to touch them? Neither

Could it be that children lacked the knowledge of how to determine whether or not the figurines worked, or believed they were not allowed to touch them? Neither interpretation seems plausible. Recall that children had just seen the naïve experimenter place the figurines on the box, and were asked to sort the figurines by this naïve experimenter, not by the apparently knowledgeable experimenter who told them about which figurine worked. In principle, the fact that the person who asked children to sort the figurines had tried them out on the music box as children watched, and also implied that exploring the figurines would provide information about how the music box worked by saying “I don’t know how it works, but it looks like you can put these pieces on this thing here [placing a hand on the center of the music box]. I wonder what will happen if I do that!”, should have primed children’s exploration if they conceptualized such exploration as informative. Furthermore, the naïve informant left the table and sat faced away from the child during the task, attempting to remove potential social pressure not to question the informant’s testing. However, given that testing the figurines would have been audible to the nearby naïve experimenter, future studies may be useful to assess whether additional children would have tested the figurines if left in total privacy. I think that children might well have felt they weren't supposed to test the figurines on the music box itself, and this explanation doesn't completely satisfy me. The setup makes it seem like some kind of game, and testing directly on the music box might intuitively seem like cheating.