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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. 

Childhood is a pinnacle of both creativity and curiosity, and although these constructs theoretically overlap, few studies have probed whether they are directly related in childhood or driven by similar cognitive and emotional processes. Across two online Zoom sessions, 36 3- to 6 year-olds completed six tasks measuring diverse manifestations of curiosity and creativity, as well as tasks assessing vocabulary, self-esteem, and executive function. Caregivers also completed questionnaires regarding their children's curiosity. Only two significant, positive correlations were found between indices of creativity and curiosity: between originality of ideas (creativity) and breadth of exploration (curiosity), and between creativity on a production-based task and parent-reported breadth of exploration (curiosity). Further, the two constructs were predicted by different child characteristics. Age was the main predictor of creativity; originality of children's ideas in two divergent thinking tasks decreased with age, while fluency and holistic ratings of production-based tasks increased. Self-esteem, in turn, was the strongest predictor of curiosity, correlating positively with several subtypes of parent-reported curiosity. The results of this exploratory study suggest creativity and curiosity may not be as closely linked in childhood as some have proposed, and that pinpointing their relations will require careful attention to the individual components and expressions of each construct. 

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.