Young Children's Directed Question Asking in Preschool Classrooms.

Question asking is a prevalent aspect of children's speech, providing a means by which young learners can rapidly gain information about the world. Previous research has demonstrated that children exhibit sensitivity to the knowledge state of potential informants in laboratory settings. However, it remains unclear whether and how young children are inclined to direct questions that support learning deeper content to more knowledgeable informants in naturalistic classroom contexts.

Infants evaluate informativeness of evidence and predict causal events as revealed in theta oscillations and predictive looking.

This study investigates 16-month-old infants' sensitivity to the informativeness of evidence and its potential link to infants' ability to draw accurate causal inferences and predict unfolding events. Employing concurrent EEG and eye tracking, data from 66 infants revealed significantly increased theta oscillatory activity when infants expected to see causally unconfounded evidence compared to confounded evidence, suggesting heightened cognitive engagement in anticipation of informative evidence. Crucially, this difference was more pronounced in the subset of infants who later made correct predictions, suggesting that they had correctly inferred the causal structure based on the evidence presented.

Predicting Learning: Understanding the Role of Executive Functions in Children's Belief Revision Using Bayesian Models.

Recent studies suggest that learners who are asked to predict the outcome of an event learn more than learners who are asked to evaluate it retrospectively or not at all. One possible explanation for this "prediction boost" is that it helps learners engage metacognitive reasoning skills that may not be spontaneously leveraged, especially for individuals with still-developing executive functions. In this paper, we combined multiple analytic approaches to investigate the potential role of executive functions in elementary school-aged children's science learning.

Early environments and exploration in the preschool years.

A great deal of research has demonstrated how children's exploration is driven by opportunities for learning. However, less work has investigated how individual differences across children and their environmental contexts relate to patterns in playful exploration. We performed a "mega-analysis" in which we pooled preschool-aged children's play data from four past experiments in our lab (N = 278; M(age) = 56 months) and correlated play behaviors with age and socioeconomic status (median income, modal education in children's home zip codes).

Do reflection prompts promote children's conflict monitoring and revision of misconceptions?

We tested whether reflection prompts enhance conflict monitoring and facilitate the revision of misconceptions. German children (N = 97, M = 7.20, 56% female) were assigned to a prediction or a prediction with reflection condition that included reflection prompts.

Children Use Teachers' Beliefs About Their Abilities to Calibrate Explore-Exploit Decisions.

Models of the explore-exploit problem have explained how children's decision making is weighed by a bias for information (directed exploration), randomness, and generalization. These behaviors are often tested in domains where a choice to explore (or exploit) is guaranteed to reveal an outcome. An often overlooked but critical component of the assessment of explore-exploit decisions lies in the expected success of taking actions in the first place-and, crucially, how such decisions might be carried out when learning from others.

What's in the Box? Preschoolers Consider Ambiguity, Expected Value, and Information for Future Decisions in Explore-Exploit Tasks.

Self-directed exploration in childhood appears driven by a desire to resolve uncertainties in order to learn more about the world. However, in adult decision-making, the choice to explore new information rather than exploit what is already known takes many factors beyond uncertainty (such as expected utilities and costs) into account. The evidence for whether young children are sensitive to complex, contextual factors in making exploration decisions is limited and mixed.

Seeing the Error in My "": A Quantified Degree of Belief Change Correlates with Children's Pupillary Surprise Responses Following Explicit Predictions.

Bayesian models allow us to investigate children's belief revision alongside physiological states, such as "surprise". Recent work finds that pupil dilation (or the "pupillary surprise response") following expectancy violations is predictive of belief revision. How can probabilistic models inform the interpretations of "surprise"? Shannon Information considers the likelihood of an observed event, given prior beliefs, and suggests stronger surprise occurs following unlikely events.

Talk of the Town mobile app platform: New method for engaging family in STEM learning and research in homes and communities.

Children do not just learn in the classroom. They engage in "informal learning" every day just by spending time with their family and peers. However, while researchers know this occurs, less is known about the science of this learning-how this learning works.

Partial mental simulation explains fallacies in physical reasoning.

People can reason intuitively, efficiently, and accurately about everyday physical events. Recent accounts suggest that people use mental simulation to make such intuitive physical judgments. But mental simulation models are computationally expensive; how is physical reasoning relatively accurate, while maintaining computational tractability? We suggest that people make use of , mentally moving forward in time only parts of the world deemed relevant.

The effects of information utility and teachers' knowledge on evaluations of under-informative pedagogy across development.

Teaching is a powerful way to transmit knowledge, but with this power comes a hazard: When teachers fail to select the best set of evidence for the learner, learners can be misled to draw inaccurate inferences. Evaluating others' failures as teachers, however, is a nontrivial problem; people may fail to be informative for different reasons, and not all failures are equally blameworthy. How do learners evaluate the quality of teachers, and what factors influence such evaluations? Here, we present a Bayesian model of teacher evaluation that considers the utility of a teacher's pedagogical sampling given their prior knowledge.

The Intentional Selection Assumption.

There exists a rich literature describing how social context influences decision making. Here, we propose a novel framing of social influences, the Intentional Selection Assumption. This framework proposes that, when a person is presented with a set of options by another social agent, people may treat the set of options as intentionally selected, reflecting the chooser's inferences about the presenter and the presenter's goals.

Organizing the Methodological Toolbox: Lessons Learned From Implementing Developmental Methods Online.

Adapting studies typically run in the lab, preschool, or museum to online data collection presents a variety of challenges. The solutions to those challenges depend heavily on the specific questions pursued, the methods used, and the constraints imposed by available technology. We present a partial sample of solutions, discussing approaches we have developed for adapting studies targeting a range of different developmental populations, from infants to school-aged children, and utilizing various online methods such as high-framerate video presentation, having participants interact with a display on their own computer, having the experimenter interact with both the participant and an actor, recording free-play with physical objects, recording infant looking times both offline and live, and more.

Children With More Uncertainty in Their Intuitive Theories Seek Domain-Relevant Information.

How do changes in learners' knowledge influence information seeking? We showed preschoolers ( = 100) uncertain outcomes for events and let them choose which event to resolve. We found that children whose intuitive theories were at immature stages were more likely to seek information to resolve uncertainty about an outcome in the related domains, but children with more mature knowledge were not. This result was replicated in a second experiment but with the nuance that children at intermediate stages of belief development-when the causal outcome would be most ambiguous-were the most motivated to resolve the uncertainty.

"There's something inside": Children's intuitions about animate agents.

From infancy, humans have the ability to distinguish animate agents from inert objects, and preschoolers map biological and mechanical insides to their appropriate kinds. However, less is known about how identifying something as an animate agent shapes specific inferences about its internal properties. Here, we test whether preschool children (N = 92; North American population) have specifically biological expectations about animate agents, or if they have more general expectations that animate agents should have an internal source of motion.

Pedagogical questions promote causal learning in preschoolers.

What maximizes instructional impact in early childhood? We propose a simple intervention employing "Pedagogical Questions". We explore whether swapping some instructional language with questions in psychosomatic storybooks improves preschoolers' memory, learning, and generalization. Seventy-two preschoolers were randomly assigned to one of three conditions and were read storybooks employing either Direct Instruction, Pedagogical Questions, or Control content.

Evaluating recall error in preschoolers: Category expectations influence episodic memory for color.

Despite limited memory capacity, children are exceptional learners. How might children engage in meaningful learning despite limited memory systems? Past research suggests that adults integrate category knowledge and noisy episodic traces to aid recall when episodic memory is noisy or incomplete (e.g.

Balancing exploration and exploitation with information and randomization.

Explore-exploit decisions require us to trade off the benefits of exploring unknown options to learn more about them, with exploiting known options, for immediate reward. Such decisions are ubiquitous in nature, but from a computational perspective, they are notoriously hard. There is therefore much interest in how humans and animals make these decisions and recently there has been an explosion of research in this area.

The rhythm of learning: Theta oscillations as an index of active learning in infancy.

Active learning is a critical component of human development, however, the mechanisms supporting it are not fully understood. Given that early learning experiences may affect both infants' immediate learning success, as well as their motivation to learn, it is particularly important to investigate the mechanisms of active learning in this period, when the foundations of learning habits and curiosity are built. Traditional behavioural approaches of studying infant learning face challenges that emerging tools from neuroscience may help relieve.

Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access, and Impact.

We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers, science, and society.

Inconvenient Samples: Modeling Biases Related to Parental Consent by Coupling Observational and Experimental Results.

In studies involving human subjects, voluntary participation may lead to sampling bias, thus limiting the generalizability of findings. This effect may be especially pronounced in developmental studies, where parents serve as both the primary environmental input and decision maker of whether their child participates in a study. We present a novel empirical and modeling approach to estimate how parental consent may bias measurements of children's behavior.

Opportunities and challenges integrating resource-rational analysis with developmental perspectives.

Lieder and Griffiths present the computational framework "resource-rational analysis" to address the reverse-engineering problem in cognition. Here we discuss how developmental psychology affords a unique and critical opportunity to employ this framework, but which is overlooked in this piece. We describe how developmental change provides an avenue for ongoing work as well as inspiration for expansion of the resource-rational approach.

Design Drives Discovery in Causal Learning.

We assessed whether an artifact's design can facilitate recognition of abstract causal rules. In Experiment 1, 152 three-year-olds were presented with evidence consistent with a relational rule (i.e.