Speaker
Description
Research shows that young children are “naive psychologists”, adept at understanding and navigating the social world. However, much of this work portrays them as passive recipients of information about other agents. When such information is not available, children may leverage their competences for active learning, exploration, and hypothesis-testing to acquire it. We report two studies which test whether pre- and elementary-school-aged children can select informative observations about novel agents and interaction partners.
In Study 1, 3- to 7-year-old children (data collection ongoing; current n = 36, planned n = 80) are introduced to animated alien characters, and asked to answer questions about their goals and traits. To do so, children can watch one of two video clips: one depicts a scenario that is likely to yield the answer to the question, the other is underinformative or confounded. We assess whether children select the relatively more informative video.
In Study 2, we tested whether 6- to 12-year-old children (n = 97) rationally seek information about an interaction partner’s generosity. Children played an economic game with a puppet, who had previously made self- or other-benefiting allocation decisions. Children could choose which decision outcomes to reveal, with some decisions being more informative about how highly the partner valued them. We found that children’s selections fit the predictions from a normative Bayesian model of optimal information search (Quillien, 2023).
Together, these studies examine children’s active learning in the social domain, and shed light on how children systematically gather evidence to learn about others.
