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Despite the vital role of curiosity-driven exploration in learning, our understanding of how to enhance children’s curiosity remains limited. Here, we tested whether hearing a strategic curiosity story with curiosity-promoting themes (e.g., strategically approaching uncertainty, adapting flexibly to new information) versus a control story with traditional pedagogical themes (e.g., following rules, learning from others) would influence children’s strategic exploration across two cultures. Three- to 6-year-olds from the United States (N = 138) and Turkey (N = 88) were randomly assigned to hear one of these stories over Zoom, before playing a game in which they searched for sea creatures across five fish tanks. All tanks had the same number of hiding spots but varied in the number of creatures they contained. Time was limited and children could not return to prior tanks, pushing them to allocate search effort strategically. Results indicated that across both countries, children in the strategic curiosity condition explored the virtual “aquarium” more broadly; they moved through tanks more rapidly than children in the control condition and were more likely to explore all five tanks before time ran out. Children in the strategic curiosity condition also showed relatively more strategic search, adapting their search based on the likelihood of finding creatures in each tank. While further research is needed to pinpoint which elements of our stories produced differences in search behavior and whether they did so by enhancing or inhibiting children’s strategic exploration, storybooks appear to be a promising method for shaping children’s exploration across multiple countries.
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Developmental differences in children and adults’ enforcement of explore versus exploit search strategies in the United States and Turkey
Abstract Across development, as children acquire a deeper understanding of their environment, they explore less and take advantage, or “exploit,” what they already know. Here, we test whether children also enforce exploration‐oriented search behaviors onto others. Specifically, we ask whether children are more likely to encourage a search agent to explore versus exploit their environment, and whether this pattern varies across childhood (between 3 and 6 years). We also ask whether this pattern differs between children and adults, and generalizes across two different sociocultural contexts—Turkey and the United States—that differ on dimensions that might relate to children's decisions about exploration (e.g., curiosity‐focused educational practices, attitudes toward uncertainty avoidance). Participants (N = 358) watched an agent search for rewards and were asked at various points whether the agent should “stay” (exploit) in their current location, or “go” (explore) to a new location. At all points in the experiment, children enforced exploration significantly more often than adults. Early in the agent's search, children in the US enforced exploration more often than children in Turkey; later in the search, younger children (from both sociocultural contexts) were more likely to continue enforcing exploration compared to older children. These findings highlight that children are not only highly exploratory themselves, but also enforce exploration onto others—underscoring the central role that exploration plays in driving early cognitive development across diverse sociocultural contexts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2047194
- PAR ID:
- 10509406
- Publisher / Repository:
- Developmental Science
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Developmental Science
- ISSN:
- 1363-755X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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ABSTRACT Although exploratory play is considered a hallmark of cognitive development and learning, relatively few studies have been able to quantitatively characterize the shifts that may occur in children's approach to exploration. One reason for this gap is due to challenges coding and analyzing children's exploratory play behavior. In our paper, we employ a novel computational modeling approach to understand whether and how children's exploratory play patterns shift in early childhood (3‐ to 11‐years‐old). We analyze data from children (N = 432) across five different experiments that varied in the type of exploration task (including novel toys, novel topics, and novel envelopes). Children's behaviors were coded action‐by‐action according to whether children repeated an action on the same type of target, switched to a novel target, or terminated play. Our computational Markov model searches over the space of possible “stay,” “switch,” and “end” parameters to quantify child‐specific transition probabilities. We find that overall, older children are less likely to perseverate, more likely to switch, and more likely to end the task earlier. Our approach provides a demonstration of how Markov models can be used to map the process of play, providing insight into theories of developmental changes in exploration. SummaryWe use Markov models to quantify developmental shifts in children's exploratory play across five naturalistic tasks.Older children showed increased exploratory variability and decreased perseveration during play.Developmental effects were most consistent in novel toy tasks, but varied across contexts.Our findings help reconcile conflicting prior research by highlighting the role of task structure and developmental changes in exploratory strategy.more » « less
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Abstract How do children learn about the structure of the social world? We tested whether children would extract patterns from an agent's social choices to make inferences about multiple groups’ relative social standing. In Experiment 1, 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children (N = 36; tested in Central New York) saw an agent and three groups (Group‐A,Group‐B, andGroup‐C) and observed the agent choose between pairs of individuals from different groups. Across pairwise selections, a pattern emerged: The agent chose individuals fromGroup‐A > Group‐B > Group‐C. Children tracked the agent's choices to predict thatGroup‐Awas “most‐preferred” and the “leader” and thatGroup‐Cwas “least‐preferred” and the “helper.” In Experiments 2 and 3, we examined children's reasoning about a more complex pattern involving four groups and tested a wider age range. In Experiment 2, 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children (N = 98; tested in Central New York) used the agent's pattern of pairwise choices to infer that the agent likedGroup‐A > Group‐B > Group‐C > Group‐Dand to make predictions about which groups were likely to be “leaders” and “helpers.” In Experiment 3, we found evidence for social specificity in children's reasoning: 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children (N = 96; from 26 US States) made inferences about groups’ relativesocialbut notphysicalpower from the agent's pattern of affiliative choices across the four groups. These findings showcase a mechanism through which children may learn about societal‐level hierarchies through the patterns they observe over time in people's group‐based social choices. Research HighlightsChildren in our sample extracted patterns from an agent's positive social choices between multiple groups to reason about groups’ relative social standing.Children used the pattern of an agent's positive social choices to guide their reasoning about which groups were likely to be “leaders” and “helpers” in a fictional town.The pattern that emerged in an agent's choices of friends shaped children's thinking about groups’ relativesocialbut notphysicalpower.Children tracked social choices to reason about group‐based hierarchies at the individual level (which groups an agent prefers) and societal level (which groups are privileged).more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13520
