Preschoolers' information search strategies: Inefficient but adaptive

Abstract

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.

Seeking new information with old questions: Children and adults reuse and recombine concepts from prior questions

“…For example, younger children ask more hypothesis-scanning questions, which inefficiently target a single hypothesis, compared to older children and adults (Herwig, 1982;Legare et al, 2013;Mosher & Hornsby, 1966;Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015;Ruggeri & Lombrozo, 2015). In addition, children are more likely to ask redundant and unnecessary questions, which target information that has already been successfully learned from prior questions (Chai et al, 2023;Ruggeri et al, 2016). Thus, we might also expect developmental change in reuse and remixing between children and adults (and perhaps also across childhood).…”

“…E. Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007), children's failure to generate informative questions in standard 20-questions tasks stands out as a puzzling result. Prior work has appealed to the linguistic requirements of the task (Swaboda et al, 2022), low levels of cognitive flexibility in young children (Legare et al, 2013), the challenge of identifying abstract categories to query (Ruggeri & Feufel, 2015;Ruggeri et al, 2019Ruggeri et al, , 2021, and the challenge of avoiding redundant questions (Chai et al, 2023;Ruggeri et al, 2016).…”

“…We speculate that children's superior performance in the present research can be attributed to two specific features of our task. First, prior work has shown that one source of young children's inefficient question asking is their tendency to continue question asking beyond the point at which no uncertainty remains (Chai et al, 2023;Ruggeri et al, 2016). In our task, this is impossible beecause participants only ask one question per trial.…”

The Efficiency of Question‐Asking Strategies in a Real‐World Visual Search Task

“…This choice is in line with previous work. For instance, Ruggeri et al (2016) examine the efficiency of children's stopping rule as a potential source of developmental change in question-asking efficiency (see also Chai, Xu, Swaboda, & Ruggeri, 2023). In particular, the authors found that children are significantly more likely than adults to continue their search for information beyond the point at which a single hypothesis remains, and thus to ask questions and select objects associated with zero information gain.…”