Children’s sequential information search is sensitive to environmental probabilities

Abstract

We investigated 4th-grade children's search strategies on sequential search tasks in which the goal is to identify an unknown target object by asking yes-no questions about its features. We used exhaustive search to identify the most efficient question strategies and evaluated the usefulness of children's questions accordingly. Results show that children have good intuitions regarding questions' usefulness and search adaptively, relative to the statistical structure of the task environment. Search was especially efficient in a task environment that was representative of real-world experiences. This suggests that children may use their knowledge of real-world environmental statistics to guide their search behavior. We also compared different related search tasks. We found positive transfer effects from first doing a number search task on a later person search task.

Do People Ask Good Questions?

“…Such tasks typically create a scenario (such as a game) where a learner must ask questions or perform certain actions in order to acquire information (e.g., Coenen et al 2015;Markant and Gureckis 2014a, b;Meder and Nelson 2012;Nelson et al 2014;Ruggeri and Feufel 2015;Ruggeri et al 2016). 1 The key concern in this work is if children and adults ask the "best" or most informative question as measured by computational models.…”

“…In most laboratory tasks that try to mimic these real-life situations, the space of possible hypotheses (or alternative world states) that the learner is trying to discriminate is relatively curtailed, ranging from around 20 hypotheses (Ruggeri and Feufel 2015;Ruggeri et al 2016;Nelson et al 2014) to as few as two (Meder and Nelson 2012;Coenen et al 2015;Markant and Gureckis 2014a). Similarly, many tasks allow only yes/no questions, which constrains the size of the set of answers (e.g., Ruggeri et al 2016 only allowed yes/no questions but provided "some" 1 In some studies, participants performed information-seeking actions, such as clicking on a certain part of an object, to obtain information about the object, which is, for our purposes, equivalent to asking information-seeking questions.…”

“…as an additional, third answer; Coenen et al 2015 had as many as four possible nodes or components that could be intervened on one at a time). Finally, a common strategy in the laboratory literature has been to effectively provide people with a predetermined list of questions allowing them to select the best (e.g., Nelson et al 2014;Coenen et al 2015;Meder and Nelson 2012). Although this approach simplifies data analysis considerably, it relieves learners from the burden of generating interesting and informative questions from scratch.…”

Testing one or multiple: How beliefs about sparsity affect causal experimentation

“…This is CAUSAL EXPERIMENTATION 7 similar to a Test One strategy that turns on one switch at a time. In experiments using versions of the Twenty Questions game, both adults and, to a lesser degree, children have been shown to be able to use the Test Half method successfully (Nelson, Divjak, Gudmundsdottir, Martignon, & Meder, 2014;Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015;Ruggeri, Lombrozo, Griffiths, & Xu, 2016;Ruggeri & Lombrozo, 2015).…”

“…This is CAUSAL EXPERIMENTATION 7 similar to a Test One strategy that turns on one switch at a time. In experiments using versions of the Twenty Questions game, both adults and, to a lesser degree, children have been shown to be able to use the Test Half method successfully (Nelson, Divjak, Gudmundsdottir, Martignon, & Meder, 2014;Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015;Ruggeri, Lombrozo, Griffiths, & Xu, 2016;Ruggeri & Lombrozo, 2015).Importantly, using a Test Half (or Test Multiple) strategy is sometimes considered a reasoning error (particularly in work on Control of Variables in the science education literature).For example, a child that chooses a test that simultaneously manipulates a plant's light exposure, and fertilizer, would be recorded as low-performing in a classic CV experiment (Klahr et al, 1993), because changing or setting many variables at once is thought to confound individual variables.The Test One and Test Half/Multiple strategies are typically studied in different kinds of psychological tasks. However, as demonstrated by the switch example, they can both be reasonable approaches for testing the causal impact of multiple variables.…”