Children’s exploratory play tracks the discriminability of hypotheses

Siegel, Max; Magid, Rachel; Pelz, Madeline; Tenenbaum, Joshua B.; Schulz, Laura

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-23431-2

Cited by 22 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…In contrast, children's spontaneous responses in Experiment 2 distinguished among the windows, preferentially exploring where they had incomplete information, even without the experience of disconfirming evidence. This result is consistent with recent findings that young children recognize and react to uncertainty in their exploration behavior before they are able to explicitly articulate this understanding (e.g., Cook et al, 2011;Lapidow & Walker, 2020;Siegel et al, 2021). The current studies therefore not only provide novel evidence for an early developing, implicit sensitivity to uncertainty (e.g., Ghetti et al, 2013;, but also suggest that the purpose of this sensitivity may be to motivate and guide the selfdirected exploration behavior that is central to early learning.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers

Lapidow

Killeen

Walker

2021

Developmental Science

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During exploration, young children often show an intuitive sensitivity to uncertainty, despite their strong tendency towards overconfidence in their explicit judgments.Here, we examine the development of children's explicit and implicit recognition of uncertainty using the same stimuli. We presented 4-and 5-year-olds with objects that varied in their amount of perceptual occlusion, and assessed their ability to distinguish among them using two types of measures. Experiment 1 used a traditional 3-point confidence scale to examine children's explicit uncertainty judgments. We compared these confidence judgments before and after they observed disconfirming evidence, to assess the impact of this experience on their acknowledgement of uncertainty in later trials. Experiment 2 examined children's exploration preference as a measure of implicit sensitivity to uncertainty. Our results indicate that children intuitively recognize gaps in their knowledge, and that this implicit recognition may be leveraged to support their explicit judgments. Specifically, we found that children's baseline confidence judgments improved significantly following the presentation of disconfirming evidence. Furthermore, when asked to make exploration decisions about the same set of objects, children showed a spontaneous sensitivity to uncertainty, prior to any evidence. Taken together, these results suggest that children's exploration behavior may be used as an early developing measure of uncertainty control and raise the intriguing possibility that the experience of unexpected outcomes may play a role in the development of metacognition.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers

Lapidow

Killeen

Walker

2021

Developmental Science

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“…For example, in their classic article on metamemory, Nelson and Narens (1990) proposed that bona fide metacognitive representations underpin decisions to terminate a memory search in memory recall tasks -a behavior that is akin to the termination of visual search under investigation here. Similarly, metacognitive knowledge is sometimes measured as an ability to flexibly adapt information gathering thresholds: similar to a decision to terminate a search, the decision to stop gathering SEARCH TERMINATION WITHOUT TASK EXPERIENCE 9 more information is widely accepted to be guided by metacognitive factors in developmental (Leckey et al, 2020;Siegel et al, 2021) and comparative (Watanabe et al, 2014) psychology.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient search termination without task experience.

Mazor¹,

Fleming²

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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As a general rule, if it is easy to detect a target in a visual scene, it is also easy to detect its absence. To account for this, models of visual search explain search termination as resulting either from counterfactual reasoning over second-order representations of search efficiency, automatic extraction of ensemble statistics of a display, or heuristic adjustment of a search termination strategy based on previous trials. Traditional few-subjects/many-trials lab-based experiments render it impossible to disentangle the unique contribution of these different processes to absence pop-out -the immediate recognition that a feature is missing from a display. In 2 preregistered large-scale online experiments (N1 = 1187; N2 = 887) we show that search termination times are already aligned with target identification times in the very first trials of the experiment before any experience with target presence. Exploratory analysis reveals that explicit metacognitive knowledge about search efficiency is not necessary for efficient search termination. We conclude that for basic stimulus properties, efficient inference about absence is independent of task experience and of explicit metacognitive knowledge about visual search.

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“…For example, they may simply consider a single or a few hypotheses for the future perceptual event resulting from a learning action (e.g., discovering one specific symbol on a character's backside), and assess the resulting reduction in their uncertainty. These computations can be performed by simply monitoring one's uncertainty (Coughlin et al., 2015; Geurten & Bastin, 2019; Goupil et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2020), and representing future perceptual events (Siegel et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains

et al. 2022

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Anticipating the learning consequences of actions is crucial to plan efficient information seeking. Such a capacity is needed for learners to determine which actions are most likely to result in learning. Here, we tested the early ontogeny of the human capacity to anticipate the amount of learning gained from seeing. In study 1, we tested infants’ capacity to anticipate the availability of sight. Fourteen‐month‐old infants (N = 72) were invited to search for a toy hidden inside a container. The participants were faster to attempt at opening a shutter when this action allowed them to see inside the container. Moreover, this effect was specifically observed when seeing inside the container was potentially useful to the participants’ goals. Thus, infants anticipated the availability of sight, and they calibrated their information‐seeking behaviors accordingly. In studies 2 and 3, we tested toddlers’ capacity to anticipate whether data would be cognitively useful for their goals. Two‐and‐a‐half‐year‐olds (N = 72) had to locate a target character hidden among distractors. The participants flipped the characters more often, and were comparatively faster to initiate this action when it yielded access to visual data allowing them to locate the target. Thus, toddlers planned their information‐seeking behaviors by anticipating the cognitive utility of sight. In contrast, toddlers did not calibrate their behaviors to the cognitive usefulness of auditory data. These results suggest that cognitive models of learning guide toddlers’ search for information. The early developmental onset of the capacity to anticipate future learning gains is crucial for active learning.

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Children’s exploratory play tracks the discriminability of hypotheses

Cited by 22 publications

References 50 publications

Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers

Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers

Efficient search termination without task experience.

Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains

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