Active Learning Across Domains and Development: How Goals and Experience Shape Children’s Pursuit of Information

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

An increasingly supported and compelling idea in child development is that children construct and facilitate their own learning by actively seeking information that reduces uncertainty, tests hypotheses, and leads to new discoveries. The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers from different domains of learning—which vary in theoretical and methodological approaches—who study how children at different stages of development actively seek information. Our objective is to better understand how children’s information seeking varies across different learning contexts (e.g., in which the goals or the value and cost of sampling choices vary), learning domains (e.g., causal learning and word learning), and age. Underlying this aim is the exploration of questions related to domain specificity versus domain generality, transfer of learning, and developmental change.

Paper 1 investigates the role of active learning to reduce uncertainty in language acquisition in preschool-age children. Paper 2 demonstrates the unique role of social information in influencing how children seek information in a probabilistic learning task across early to middle childhood. Paper 3 explores how children, adolescents, and adults intervene to disambiguate causal systems. A scholar with expertise in active learning will lead a discussion about bridging perspectives and development, which will facilitate the illumination of commonalities and differences.

Together, this research brings together disciplines across the field child development to deeply explore children’s active learning, highlighting ways in which new perspectives on children’s search for information can lead to better understanding of how children construct their own learning opportunities.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Rista Plate, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Azzurra Ruggeri, Max-Planck Institute for Human Development

Individual Presentations

• Children Actively Sample Information in Support of Learning New Words - Presenting Author: Martin Zettersten, Princeton University; Non-Presenting Author: Koeun Choi, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Non-Presenting Author: Heather Kirkorian, University of Wisconsin - Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Jenny R Saffran, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• How Children Weight Social and Nonsocial Information When Searching for Rewards - Presenting Author: Rista Plate, University of Pennsylvania; Non-Presenting Author: Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin - Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Aaron Cochrane, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Author: C. Shawn Green, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Author: Seth David Pollak, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Causal Information-Seeking Strategies Change Across Development - Presenting Author: Kate Nussenbaum, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Alexandra O Cohen, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Zachary Davis, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: David Halpern, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Todd Gureckis, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Catherine Hartley, Weill Cornell Medicine