Preschoolers’ Search for Explanatory Information Within Adult–Child Conversation

Abstract

This research examined children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive, in conversations with adults. If children actively seek explanatory knowledge, they should react differently depending on whether they receive a causal explanation. Study 1 examined conversations following 6 preschoolers' (ages 2-4 years) causal questions in naturalistic situations (using the CHILDES database). Children more often agreed and asked follow-up questions following adult explanations and, conversely, more often re-asked their original question and provided their own explanation following non-explanations. Study 2 replicated these patterns within an experimental task in 42 children ages 3-5 years. Children's reactions following explanatory versus non-explanatory information confirm that young children are motivated to seek causal information actively and use specific conversational strategies to obtain it.Explanatory understanding is central to cognition, allowing us to see how the world works and to predict and interpret events in our environment (Ahn, Kim, Lassaline, & Dennis, 2000;Carey, 1985;Murphy & Medin, 1985;Rehder, 2003;Wellman & Gelman, 1998). Even young children search for causal explanations (Callanan & Oakes, 1992). Yet surprisingly little is known about young children's search for explanations, and even less is known about how they respond to the information they obtain. The current research examines young children's questions and the reactions to the answers they receive as a means for exploring the active role that children play in successfully obtaining explanatory information.During the preschool years, children assemble explanation-rich naïve theories (Carey, 1985;Wellman & Gelman, 1998), ask many questions (Chouinard, 2007;Hickling & Wellman, 2001), and actively pursue explanatory information, a motivation that has been variously characterized as an innate "theory drive" (Gopnik, 1998), a human curiosity about the world (Simon, 2001), or a desire to resolve disequilibrium (Isaacs, 1930;Piaget, 1954), among others. It is therefore important to examine how explanatory motivations are manifested within children's everyday behavior. Hence, our central question: How does childhood explanation-seeking actually work?In the present studies, we examined the patterns of conversational exchange between children and adults to clarify how children respond to explanatory information. We focus on situations where children actively request information from an adult and we examine how they react to the adult's answer. This strategy permits us to gain insight into whether and when children preferentially seek explanations over other types of responses. Our background assumption is that one of the most important sources of explanatory information Correspondence for this article should be addressed to Brandy Frazier, now at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Psychology, 2430 Campus Road, Honolulu, HI 96822. brandy2@hawaii.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptChild Dev. Author manuscript...

Young children's selective trust in informants

“…There are occasions when children use that cognitive capacity-including the distinctively human capacity for asking questions-to query the cultural information that they receive, even from familiar sources [10,43,44]. Indeed, children are especially likely to direct their sustained-and sometimes sceptical questions-at trusted caregivers [45].…”

The early emergence and puzzling decline of relational reasoning: Effects of knowledge and search on inferring abstract concepts

“…Instead learners privilege those hypotheses that offer the best explanation relative to alternatives, even if those hypotheses don't necessarily have higher posterior probabilities (e.g., Lombrozo, 2007Lombrozo, , 2012Lombrozo & Vasilyeva, in press;Walker, Lombrozo, Legare, & Gopnik, 2014;Walker, Lombrozo, Williams, Rafferty, & Gopnik, 2016;Williams & Lombrozo, 2010. More specifically (e.g., Bonawitz & Lombrozo, 2012;Frazier, Gelman, & Wellman, 2009;Lombrozo, 2007), hypotheses that are formulated in the context of explaining are likely to have certain characteristics, or ''explanatory virtues." In particular, learners who explain tend to privilege hypotheses that go beyond highly salient surface features to those that are more inductively rich and robust.…”

Wondering how: Children’s and adults’ explanations for mundane, improbable, and extraordinary events

“…Preschoolers also are sensitive to whether adults' responses to their questions contain explanatory information. For instance, young children prefer statements that contain causal information to statements of equal length with no causal information (Frazier, Gelman, & Wellman, 2009), and they prefer noncircular to circular explanations (Corriveau & Kurkul, 2014). In addition to seeking explanations, young children are adept at providing them.…”