How is the hypothesis space represented? Evidence from young children’s active search and predictions in a multiple-cue inference task.

Jones, Angela; Markant, Douglas; Pachur, Thorsten; Gopnik, Alison; Ruggeri, Azzurra

doi:10.1037/dev0001201

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Alternatively, children may have motivations independent of the objectives of the task, such as socially engaging with the experimenter (Jaswal & Kondrad, 2016). How children represent their environment and understand experimental tasks, and the extent to which this diverges from researchers' assumptions, may be influenced directly or indirectly by multiple factors, including age (Jones et al., 2021); learning experiences; and interindividual differences in cognition or cultural, racial, and socioeconomic background. As a result, researchers can observe seemingly inefficient behaviors, despite the fact that children apply broadly efficient (or at least meaningful) strategies, when there is a mismatch between children's assumptions and the ground truth about the identity of the potential hypotheses and their relative likelihood.…”

Section: Missing Pieces In the Active‐learning Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

Children's information‐search strategies: Operationalizing efficiency and effectiveness

Török,

Stanciu,

Ruggeri

2024

Child Dev Perspectives

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Research on the development of active learning and information search behaviors has been growing rapidly, drawing interest from multiple disciplines, from developmental psychology to cognitive science and artificial intelligence. These different perspectives can open pathways to understanding how preschool‐age children grow into adaptive and efficient active learners. However, the lack of a shared vocabulary, operationalizations, and research paradigms has led to limited cross‐talk and some conflicting findings. In this article, we advocate for using a shared operationalization of a “good” information‐search strategy, as a function of its efficiency and effectiveness within a given ecology, based on the information‐theoretic measure of expected information gain and observed behavioral outcomes, respectively. We also discuss factors that should be considered when designing experiments that examine children's information‐search competence, specifically, using formal models as performance benchmarks and accounting for children's prior knowledge, assumptions, and self‐generated goals.

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Section: Missing Pieces In the Active‐learning Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

Children's information‐search strategies: Operationalizing efficiency and effectiveness

Török,

Stanciu,

Ruggeri

2024

Child Dev Perspectives

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“…Younger children tend to search more exhaustively and less systematically than older children, and have difficulty identifying and attending to the most relevant information (Betsch et al, 2016;Davidson, 1991aDavidson, ,1991bDavidson, , 1996. They also have difficulty reasoning about more than one hypothesis at a time and tend to ask about one item at a time in question-asking games, possibly because they struggle to reason about task-relevant information in a hierarchical, abstract manner (Bramley et al, 2022;Jones et al, 2021;Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015;Ruggeri et al, 2021).…”

Section: The Development Of Active Learning Strategies and Memory In ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The differential impact of active learning on children’s memory.

Stanciu,

Jones,

Metzner

et al. 2024

Developmental Psychology

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Successful active learning has often been quantified with respect to either the efficiency of information search or the accuracy of subsequent recall. In this article, we explored the hypothesis that children's memory is influenced by the types of information search strategies they implement, which may emphasize different aspects of the task stimuli. As a consequence, younger children's well-documented search inefficiency may turn out to be advantageous and result in better memory for some aspects of the task. In the current experiment, 5-to 10-year-old children (N = 124) played (active condition) or observed an agent play (passive condition) 20-questions games, and were then tested for their memory of several different aspects of the game both immediately after and a week later. Children showed overall improved recall in the active condition. Search efficiency was positively related to recall of the game's solution, but did not significantly impact performance on the other memory tests. Public Significance StatementUnderstanding the differential effects of information search strategies on memory across development has immediate implications for educators. First, encouraging the development of more efficient information search skills in young children may have positive consequences for other aspects of cognition such as memory. Furthermore, our results show that active participation in information search benefits retention, and, therefore, could be a particularly useful educational tool for young children.

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“…For example, children may ask a question intended to confirm or rule out a hypothesis that they believe is more likely than others, even though the researchers assume that all the considered hypotheses should be considered equally likely (see Bramley et al, 2022;Ruggeri & Lombrozo, 2015). Also, compared with adults, children may have altogether different ways to represent the presented stimuli (see Jones et al, 2021), and how the stimuli are represented may even differ across children.…”

Section: A More Pessimistic Perspective On Children's Early Active-le...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, research on ecological active learning has focused on identifying key developmental differences in the efficiency and adaptiveness of children's search, highlighting three important sources of developmental change: an increasing ability to recognize and exploit the abstract, hierarchical structure of the hypothesis space ( Jones et al, 2021), increasingly sophisticated verbal abilities and vocabulary (Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015), and a growing ability to implement efficient rules to decide when to stop searching for more information (Ruggeri et al, 2016). However, it is not yet known why these changes occur, or what task-related, cultural, environmental, or individual factors (e.g., differences in cognitive abilities, vocabulary, motivation, personality, education, parenting style) drive developmental changes in active learning, how these factors interact with each other, or how their relative importance changes with age.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Introduction to Ecological Active Learning

Ruggeri

2022

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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This article introduces ecological active learning, a developmental framework that focuses on children’s ability to adapt and tailor their active-learning strategies to the particular structure and characteristics of a learning environment. Results of seminal studies indicate that efficient, adaptive search strategies emerge around 3 years of age, much earlier than previously assumed. This work highlights the importance of developing age-appropriate paradigms that capture children’s early competence to gain a more comprehensive and fair picture of their active-learning abilities. Also, it offers a process-oriented theoretical framework that can accommodate and reconcile a sparse but growing body of work documenting children’s active and adaptive learning. Three of the most promising avenues for future research on children’s ecological active learning are discussed.

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How is the hypothesis space represented? Evidence from young children’s active search and predictions in a multiple-cue inference task.

Cited by 5 publications

References 58 publications

Children's information‐search strategies: Operationalizing efficiency and effectiveness

Children's information‐search strategies: Operationalizing efficiency and effectiveness

The differential impact of active learning on children’s memory.

An Introduction to Ecological Active Learning

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