Poster #30 - Infants are strategic and selective in their early information seeking

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Every day, young learners are confronted with new challenges. Whether it’s trying to navigate their environment by crawling, successfully communicating with their caregivers, or just trying to get a new toy to work. To overcome these challenges, there are several strategies infants can deploy. Often, they will seek a solution to a problem by directly acting on and exploring their environment (Gopnik et al., 1999). Other times, infants also seek out information by explicitly requesting it from others (Lucca & Wilbourn, 2018). What remains unclear is the decision-making process that underlies infants’ use of one strategy over another. Thus, in the current study we investigated infants’ early persistence during problem solving to test which factors influence infants’ decision to seek out information by requesting help from others versus independently exploring their environment.
We tested 12- and 18-month-olds’ (n = 124) problem solving and help seeking when presented with toys placed inside out-of-reach containers (accessible only by rope-pulling). In a between-subjects design, infants watched an experimenter act on the problem in one of three ways, which varied as a function of the experimenter’s ability to successfully solve the problem. The experimenter either solved it easily with low effort (expert condition, n = 41), struggled before finally solve it (competent condition, n = 43), or struggled before ultimately failing to solve it (incompetent condition, n = 40). Then, infants were given the opportunity to solve the task on their own. Half of the time the task was easy for the infants to solve, and half the time the task was impossible for the infants to solve.
Findings revealed that when the task was impossible, 18-month-olds directed more requests for help towards the experimenter they had evidence could easily and successfully solve the problem (expert condition: Mean help requests = 4.58, SE = 1.17), compared to an experimenter they knew struggled to solve the problem (competent condition: M = 2.00, SE = .58; Z = 4.80, p < .0001) or couldn’t solve it at all (incompetent condition: M = 2.13, SE = .71; Z = 4.54, p < .0001). Critically, infants only engaged in this kind of strategic help-seeking when they actually needed help, that is, when the task was impossible for them to do on their own. When the task was easily solvable, infants across conditions solved the task without seeking help (p’s>.05).
In sum, these findings demonstrate that by 18-months, infants are strategic and selective in their exploration and help seeking: they seek out help, but only from competent actors, and only when help is needed. Together these findings help elucidate the rational decision-making processes that guide infants’ early learning.

Authors

• Kelsey Lucca, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Horton, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kaitlin McManus, Colby
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lydia Simpson, Macalester
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marilena Rozaniti, Skidmore
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jasmine Lee, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ashley Sedlacek, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica Sommerville, University of Washington
  Non-Presenting Author