Speaker
Description
Children learn both through exploration and by seeking guidance from more knowledgeable and helpful others, with successful learning requiring leveraging these two different ways of acquiring information. While a large body of work shows that even young children are adaptive in the way they search for information and in their decisions about whom to ask for advice, there is little work examining children's adaptiveness in choosing the mode of learning, or what drives these decisions across development.
We investigated how children ages 7-13 made decisions about when to seek advice versus explore independently in a gamified learning task. Children learned how one continuous variable mapped onto another as a function of a binary context, and were then tested using a prediction task. Using a 2×2 between-subjects design, we manipulated (1) whether children could consult a knowledgeable adviser during learning, and (2) whether they received an explicit performance goal before learning. The adviser provided accurate mappings that were equally informative to self-generated samples, allowing us to isolate a priori preferences for guided versus independent learning. Data collection is ongoing (N = 27/100 completed; expected to be finished by October). Pilot results (N=22) revealed that children strategically sought advice when it carried no opportunity cost and following trials with larger prediction errors. Soliciting advice encouraged more exploration of the stimulus space and lead to lower prediction errors at test, while the explicit goal setting improved performance when the adviser was not available.
