•Preschool children show initial trust in an informant’s claim.•Children reassess an informant’s misleading claim in light of empirical evidence.•Children transfer their conclusions regarding the validity of a claim across tasks.•Preschoolers are able to integrate and align information from different sources. Across two experiments, an adult informant presented 220 preschoolers (34–71 months of age) with either a correct claim or an incorrect claim about how to activate a music box by using one of two toy figures. Children were then prompted to explore the figures and to discover whether the informant’s claim was correct or incorrect. Children who discovered the claim to be incorrect no longer endorsed it. Moreover, their predictions regarding a new figure’s ability to activate the music box were clearly affected by the reliability of the informant’s prior claim. Thus, children reassess an informant’s incorrect claim about an object in light of later empirical evidence and transfer their conclusions regarding the validity of that claim to subsequent objects.