The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood

Imagination and the generation of new ideas

“…Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that children performed systematically on these tasks despite the absence of any of the information generally posited to help support children's causal inferences: all the candidate causes were equally plausible given prior knowledge about physical mechanisms, and none of the candidate causes was supported by statistical data (Gopnik & Wellman, 2012;Schulz, 2012;Tenenabum, Kemp, Griffiths, & Goodman, 2011). These results suggest that children can generate abstract representations of what might count as a good solution to a problem and use these representations to constrain the hypotheses they consider.…”

“…Decades of work in cognitive development have investigated the processes underlying theory change and conceptual change (Carey, 2009;Gopnik & Wellman, 2012;Schulz, 2012). However, in the (understandable) focus on how learners change their beliefs in deep, far-reaching ways, a more commonplace mystery may have been obscured: the mystery of ordinary thought.…”

Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot?

“…[12], the presence of an adult and the context of her behavior was shown to influence a child's free exploration behavior. A series of studies [19] have shown that infants explore more if their prior beliefs are violated, i.e. if they see evidence that contradicts their expectations.…”

“…if they see evidence that contradicts their expectations. Furthermore, it was shown, through manipulation of child-toy-experimenter interaction that if evidence fails to distinguish among competing beliefs, infants explore more to disambiguate their beliefs [19]. In another study, the effects of personal curiosity traits and the school environment on academic achievements have been shown to be complex, namely, high curiosity children in challenging schools had the highest performance, whereas high curiosity children in non-challenging school had the lowest [14].…”

“…Even in infancy and early childhood, curiosity enables young learners to acquire evidence and develop models of how the world works [19]. As children get older and enter school, intrinsic curiosity is still the main drive for efficient learning even with great teachers [14,6].…”