Many adults will admit to telling white lies to children to make their lives a little easier.

But research has found children can spot this tactic, and can even tell when their parents or teachers are deliberately withholding information from them.

Once spotted, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found children will then try to fill in the gaps in the information themselves.

Determining who to trust is an important skill to learn at an early age because so much of our knowledge about the world comes from other people, explained Hyowon Gweon, lead author of the paper  which is published in the journal Cognition.
The study builds on a 2011 paper in which the team of researchers investigated how children behave when a teacher explained only one function of a toy that can do four different things.

They found children spent most of their time exploring only the function the teacher had demonstrated.

However, children who received no instruction spent more time exploring all of the toy’s features and ended up discovering more of them.

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