Speaker
Description
Prior research suggests that modal thought emerges around age four. For instance, when confronted with one certain and two uncertain options (3-cups-task), preschoolers choose randomly. Apparently, they fail to represent mutually exclusive possibilities and do not consider their uncertainty. This contrasts with findings that already 3-year-olds provide accurate metacognitive judgments about their own uncertainty. Given this divergence, the current study investigates whether poor performance in the 3-cups-task reflects immature modal cognition or whether other factors, like curiosity, mask children’s decision-making in uncertain situations.
Curiosity, conceptualized as a metacognitive feeling that is triggered by and functions to reduce uncertainty, plays a significant role in early cognition. Particularly young children benefit from curiosity-driven learning and engage in exploration, often preferring to acquire new information over immediate rewards. Hence, it is possible that their “irrational” choices in the 3-cups-task mirror an inherent trade-off between exploiting known rewards and exploring uncertain options rather than cognitive limitations.
To test this, the current study aims to resolve the potential explore-exploit trade-off within the 3-cups-task: Participants (3- and 4-year-olds, N = 68) made two choices, indicating (via stickers) which option they wanted to explore and which they wanted to exploit. Contrary to our hypotheses, preliminary results (n = 32) reveal no clear benefit from separating the two choices; children exploited the certain option only about 40% of the time. Data collection is ongoing, but this project raises broader questions regardless the final results, highlighting the complicated role of curiosity in children’s sophisticated decision-making in interaction with uncertainty.
