Learning with certainty in childhood

Baer, Carolyn; Kidd, Celeste

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2022.07.010

Cited by 17 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 122 publications

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“…Finally, better accuracy in assigning value to external rewards and computing uncertainty across development (Baer & Kidd, 2022; Nussenbaum & Hartley, 2019) may support adaptation to time horizons. In the Simplified Horizons Task, younger children did not adapt readily to time horizons, but did enlist a reward-comparison strategy by exploiting more when the available rewards were larger.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in adaptation to time horizons across development.

Zhuang,

Niebaum,

Munakata

2023

Developmental Psychology

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When making decisions, the amount of time remaining matters. When time horizons are long, exploring unknown options can inform later decisions, but when time horizons are short, exploiting known options should be prioritized. While adults and adolescents adapt their exploration in this way, it is unclear when such adaptation emerges and how individuals behave when time horizons are ambiguous, as in many real-life situations. We examined these questions by having 5-to 6-year-olds (N = 43), 11-to 12-yearolds (N = 40), and adult college students (N = 49) in the United States complete a Simplified Horizons Task under short, long, and ambiguous time horizons. Adaptation to time horizons increased with age: older children and adults explored more when horizons were long than when short, and while some younger children adapted to time horizons, younger children overall did not show strong evidence of adapting. Under ambiguous horizons, older children and adults preferred to exploit over explore, while younger children did not show this preference. Thus, adaptation to time horizons is evident by ages 11-12 and may begin to emerge around 5-6 years, and children decrease their tendencies to explore under short and ambiguous time horizons with development. This developmental shift may lead to less learning but more adaptive decision making. Public Significance StatementThe more time we have to do something, the better it is to explore different options to learn the best one. This ability to adapt exploration to time horizons may begin to emerge around 5-6 years and reach adult levels by 11-12 years. As children grow older, they explore less and exploit known options more, and this shift might lead to better decision making at the expense of learning.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in adaptation to time horizons across development.

Zhuang,

Niebaum,

Munakata

2023

Developmental Psychology

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“…Previous theoretical frameworks of curiosity have also highlighted other mechanisms that drive early learning, such as the feeling of uncertainty, since it signals an opportunity to learn and the need to close a knowledge gap (Berlyne, 1962; Loewenstein, 1994; Gottlieb et al ., 2013). When they are uncertain, children continue to explore objects and seek information (Baer & Kidd, 2022). Pedagogical demonstrations reduce uncertainty because children assume that demonstrators reveal all the relevant aspects of a novel object.…”

Section: Curiosity Beyond Linguistic Humansmentioning

confidence: 99%

A transdisciplinary view on curiosity beyond linguistic humans: animals, infants, and artificial intelligence

Forss,

Ciria,

Clark

et al. 2024

Biological Reviews

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Curiosity is a core driver for life‐long learning, problem‐solving and decision‐making. In a broad sense, curiosity is defined as the intrinsically motivated acquisition of novel information. Despite a decades‐long history of curiosity research and the earliest human theories arising from studies of laboratory rodents, curiosity has mainly been considered in two camps: ‘linguistic human’ and ‘other’. This is despite psychology being heritable, and there are many continuities in cognitive capacities across the animal kingdom. Boundary‐pushing cross‐disciplinary debates on curiosity are lacking, and the relative exclusion of pre‐linguistic infants and non‐human animals has led to a scientific impasse which more broadly impedes the development of artificially intelligent systems modelled on curiosity in natural agents. In this review, we synthesize literature across multiple disciplines that have studied curiosity in non‐verbal systems. By highlighting how similar findings have been produced across the separate disciplines of animal behaviour, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and computational cognition, we discuss how this can be used to advance our understanding of curiosity. We propose, for the first time, how features of curiosity could be quantified and therefore studied more operationally across systems: across different species, developmental stages, and natural or artificial agents.

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“…Indeed, we included an "interesting" condition to assess children's recommendations to agents with a general curiosity about a topic rather than a particular learning or entertainment goal. Curiosity is often seen as a powerful driver of science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) learning in childhood (Baer & Kidd, 2022), and children's recommendations can also reveal their own information preferences. Finally, given evidence of declining spontaneous questions about causal information during the later school years (Engel, 2015), adults may recommend entertaining sources to those seeking the most interesting book, demonstrating their own disinterest in mechanisms.…”

Section: The Current Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Young children can infer information preferences from goals and recommend appropriate sources to others.

Chuey¹,

Lockhart²,

Trouche³

et al. 2023

Developmental Psychology

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As adults, we intuitively understand how others’ goals influence their information-seeking preferences. For example, you might recommend a dense book full of mechanistic details to someone trying to learn about a topic in-depth, but a more lighthearted book filled with surprising stories to someone seeking entertainment. Moreover, you might do this with confidence despite knowing few details about either book. Even though we offer or receive such recommendations frequently as adults, we know little about how the ability to evaluate and recommend information sources to others develops. Two studies examined how children (6–9 years, Eastern U.S. residents, n = 311) and adults (U.S. residents, n = 180) select mechanistic and entertaining information sources for others depending on their goals. Participants recommended books containing mechanistic information to agents who wanted to learn and entertaining information to agents who wanted to have fun. In contrast to adults who strongly favored entertaining books, children recommended both kinds of books equally to a generally curious agent. These results suggest children can infer others’ information-seeking preferences based on their goals and recommend appropriate information sources to satisfy those goals despite possessing little topical knowledge themselves.

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Learning with certainty in childhood

Cited by 17 publications

References 122 publications

Changes in adaptation to time horizons across development.

Changes in adaptation to time horizons across development.

A transdisciplinary view on curiosity beyond linguistic humans: animals, infants, and artificial intelligence

Young children can infer information preferences from goals and recommend appropriate sources to others.

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