Speaker
Description
Curiosity can direct children’s knowledge acquisition, learning and retention. One of infants’ information-seeking strategies is social learning. While there is a wealth of literature focusing on caregiver input, the role of peers remains understudied. There is some evidence to suggest that children pick up preferences from peers but rely on adults for learning new skills. Most social influence studies have used perceptual judgement tasks which have a clear correct and incorrect answer, and adult models to establish norms, confounding the motivation behind children’s behaviour. In adults, popularity’s influence on curiosity was studied using the number of upvotes (as on Reddit) as an indicator of popularity. Inspired by this, we want to understand how popularity can influence children’s curiosity as measured by their choices and dwell times in a forced-choice tablet task. We aim to collect cross-sectional data from three-year-olds to six-year-olds to see changes across development as they begin to interact with peers in a structured context. Children will be shown two stimuli with social information (“many children looked at this!” vs “very few children looked at this!”). Additionally, we will display a scale of thumbs ups as a visual indicator of popularity. After choosing, children will see an image gradually unwarping. Pilots showed that even 3-year olds are able to discriminate between the stimuli above chance when given audio and visual cues. We hypothesise that children will choose to see the more popular stimulus, dwell longer on it and that this effect will become stronger as they age.
