The influence of children’s first action when learning causal structure from exploratory play

Sobel, David; Benton, Deon T.; Finiasz, Zoe; Taylor, Yuyi; Weisberg, Deena Skolnick

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2022.101194

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…But participants given opposed moral arguments, a recency effect on adoption was observed [ 128 , 129 ]. Perhaps more relevantly, it has been hypothesised that the first piece of information observed or produced regarding a new topic or skill becomes an "anchoring hypothesis" that strongly affects subsequent behaviour and conclusions, and is difficult to reverse by subsequent information [ 130 , 131 ]. It would be interesting to explore whether the first variant learned becomes more strongly associated with the task than subsequent variants during learning, or whether this bias is elicited during remembering for production.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution

et al. 2023

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The adoption of cultural variants by learners is affected by multiple factors including the prestige of the model and the value and frequency of different variants. However, little is known about what affects onward cultural transmission, or the choice of variants that models produce to pass on to new learners. This study investigated the effects on this choice of congruence between two contexts: the one in which variants are learned and the one in which they are later transmitted on. We hypothesized that when we are placed in a particular context, we will be more likely to produce (and therefore transmit) variants that we learned in that same (congruent) context. In particular, we tested the effect of a social contextual aspect–the relationship between model and learner. Our participants learned two methods to solve a puzzle, a variant from an “expert” (in an expert-to-novice context) and another one from a “peer” (in a peer-to-peer context). They were then asked to transmit one method onward, either to a “novice” (in a new expert-to-novice context) or to another “peer” (in a new peer-to-peer context). Participants were, overall, more likely to transmit the variant learned from an expert, evidencing an effect of by prestige bias. Crucially, in support of our hypothesis, they were also more likely to transmit the variant they had learned in the congruent context. Parameter estimation computer simulations of the experiment revealed that congruence bias was stronger than prestige bias.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution

et al. 2023

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“…Indeed, the fact that the dinosaur exhibition included both interactive and didactic (or static) elements allowed us to investigate how these different kinds of exhibits affected children’s engagement and their interactions with their caregivers. While much work in developmental psychology suggests that children learn effectively from hands-on experiences (e.g., Schulz et al, 2007 ; Chi, 2009 ; Lapidow and Walker, 2020 ; Nussenbaum et al, 2020 ; Sobel et al, 2022a ), static exhibits have different strengths and can also inspire children’s engagement in museums (e.g., Peart and Kool, 1988 ; Tunnicliffe and Scheersoi, 2009 ; Dancstep et al, 2015 ). One important question for the current study is thus the impact that these different kinds of experiences can have.…”

Section: Children’s Exploration In Museum Settingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dinos and GoPros: Children’s exploratory behaviors in a museum and their reflections on their learning

Weisberg

Dunlap²,

Sobel³

2023

Front. Psychol.

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Research in both laboratory and museum settings suggests that children’s exploration and caregiver–child interaction relate to children’s learning and engagement. Most of this work, however, takes a third-person perspective on children’s exploration of a single activity or exhibit, and does not consider children’s perspectives on their own exploration. In contrast, the current study recruited 6-to 10-year-olds (N = 52) to wear GoPro cameras, which recorded their first-person perspectives as they explored a dinosaur exhibition in a natural history museum. During a 10-min period, children were allowed to interact with 34 different exhibits, their caregivers and families, and museum staff however they wished. Following their exploration, children were asked to reflect on their exploration while watching the video they created and to report on whether they had learned anything. Children were rated as more engaged when they explored collaboratively with their caregivers. Children were more likely to report that they learned something when they were more engaged, and when they spent more time at exhibits that presented information didactically rather than being interactive. These results suggest that static exhibits have an important role to play in fostering learning experiences in museums, potentially because such exhibits allow for more caregiver–child interaction.

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“…Infants tend to direct their attention to events with intermediate complexity (supposedly to avoid wasting effort in processing overly simple or complex events; Kidd et al, 2012 ), prefer to interact with knowledgeable social partners (see Csibra and Gergely, 2009 ; Bazhydai et al, 2020 ), and are more likely to explore objects/events that violate their expectations and naïve theories (e.g., Stahl and Feigenson, 2015 ; Dunn and Bremner, 2017 ; Sim and Xu, 2017a ). Preschoolers selectively engage and spend more time exploring what they are uncertain about or what does not fit their prior beliefs (e.g., Schulz and Bonawitz, 2007 ; Bonawitz et al, 2012 ; Legare, 2012 ), preferentially rely on and query the most reliable informants (for reviews, see Mills, 2013 ; Harris et al, 2018 ), and start to use the knowledge of informative intervention to disambiguate causal structures (Schulz et al, 2007 ; Cook et al, 2011 ; McCormack et al, 2016 ; see also Sim and Xu, 2017b ; Lapidow and Walker, 2020 ; Sobel et al, 2022 ). These findings suggest that children's non-verbal information search is already pretty efficient and rather sophisticated at a very young age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschoolers' information search strategies: Inefficient but adaptive

Chai

Swaboda

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

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Although children's sensitivity to others' informativeness emerges early in life, their active information search becomes robustly efficient only around age 10. Young children's difficulty in asking efficient questions has often been hypothesized to be linked to their developing verbal competence and growing vocabulary. In this paper, we offer for the first time a quantitative analysis of 4- to 6-year-old children's information search competence by using a non-verbal version of the 20-questions game, to gain a more comprehensive and fair picture of their active learning abilities. Our results show that, even in this version, preschoolers performed worse than simulated random agents, requiring more queries to reach the solution. However, crucially, preschoolers performed better than the simulated random agents when isolating the extra, unnecessary queries, which are made after only one hypothesis is left. When additionally isolating all the unnecessary queries, children's performance looked on par with that of the simulated optimal agents. Our study replicates and enriches previous research, showing an increase in efficiency across the preschool-aged years, but also a general lack of optimality that seems to be fundamentally driven by children's strong tendency to make unnecessary queries, rather than by their verbal immaturity. We discuss how children's non-optimal, conservative information-search strategies may be adaptive, after all.

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The influence of children’s first action when learning causal structure from exploratory play

Cited by 7 publications

References 49 publications

Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution

Context congruence: How associative learning modulates cultural evolution

Dinos and GoPros: Children’s exploratory behaviors in a museum and their reflections on their learning

Preschoolers' information search strategies: Inefficient but adaptive

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