Poster #72 - Curiosity and Metacognition during Naturalistic Parent-Child Interactions

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Children express curiosity throughout early childhood. Though an elusive concept to define (Kidd & Hayden, 2015), when considered within Loewenstein’s (1994) information-gap theory, curiosity is conceptualized as arising from perceiving a gap in one’s knowledge which in turn motivates the individual to gain information to close that gap. As such, curiosity in childhood manifests in a variety of ways, including through exploration, experimentation, and language such as questions. Additionally, within Loewenstein’s theory of curiosity there is a seemingly inherent assumption that the individual possesses some level of metacognition, or the ability to think about their own thinking (Flavell, 1979). However, research has yet to explore any potential relation between curiosity and metacognition in early childhood.
Thus, the present study utilizes language-level data to explore how talk around curiosity and metacognition may occur, co-occur, and vary by context during naturalistic parent-child interactions. The sample consisted of a total of thirty-six transcripts (N = 29,729 utterances) selected from the Gleason (1980) corpus in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) and represented a sample of 12 children (aged 36.7 to 59.1 months at first visit, 6 female) across three different contexts: in-lab with mother, in-lab with father, at home during dinner. Utterances were coded first for delivery (question or statement¬) and next for content (curiosity, metacognition, directing, and irrelevant; utterances that did not fall into these categories were coded as other). Overall, 74% of utterances were statements and 26% were questions. Considering individual speakers, mothers and fathers produced similar proportions of questions, (30.75% and 30.22% respectively) whereas children produced only 17.48% questions. Across speakers, the most frequent type of question asked was curiosity questions, particularly for children as these made up 62.20% of their total questions, significantly more than mothers (z = 12.09, p < 0.000) and fathers (z = 9.50, p < 0.000). For fathers, 49.02% of their questions were coded as curiosity, significantly more than mothers (44.04%; z = 2.93, p = 0.035). Metacognitive talk was rare overall (n = 593) and most often were statements (96.12% of total metacognitive utterances). Mothers produced the most metacognitive statements (3.37%); significantly more than fathers (2.36%; z = 3.51, p = 0.0004) and children (2.27%; z = 4.12, p < 0.0001) who did not differ from each other (z = 0.3, p = 0.73). Overall, these patterns were very similar across the three contexts as well.
Taken together, these results provide insight into how curiosity and metacognition are expressed during naturalistic parent-child interactions. Importantly, both curiosity and metacognition are expressed by children, mothers, and fathers across contexts. The frequency and type of these utterances varies different ways which requires further study to entirely elucidate how we might elicit and study curiosity further. Importantly, the presence of metacognitive talk alongside expressions of curiosity is promising in utilizing the information-gap theory to operationalize the construct. Given that children have demonstrated an ability to recognize their missing knowledge, future research can highlight these gaps to generate curiosity for education and research.

Authors

• Hannah Puttre, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University