Poster #15 - Curious from day one: Examining the dimensionality of infants’ curiosity

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

Curiosity is fundamental to success in many facets of life. It has been linked to enhanced engagement and achievement in STEM fields, improved psychological well-being, and adaptive aging (Zurn & Shankar, Eds., 2020). However, our ability to cultivate curiosity is limited by an incomplete understanding of how it first develops during infancy and early childhood. This study seeks to identify the cognitive processes involved in early curiosity by assessing a range of curiosity-driven behaviors and analyzing their factor structure.

Children between the ages of 12 and 36 months (target N = 150) will be recruited to complete a battery of behavioral tasks. This battery will capture curiosity about various aspects of the physical and social world, and will be the first to integrate active (e.g., exploration) and passive (e.g., looking-based) measures. In each task, children will be presented with two stimuli - one high and one low in information value (potential to learn new information). We will compute a difference score that reflects engagement with the high-information stimulus compared with the low-information one (Table 1). This reflects the degree to which children’s behavior is explained by a drive to obtain information, as opposed to general interest, attentiveness, or activity level.

Two violation of expectations tasks will capture children’s drive to fill knowledge gaps. Children will observe events that violate principles of solidity and numeric probability as well as similar events that do not violate these principles (Stahl & Feigenson, 2015; Sim & Xu, 2017). Three toy choice tasks will capture children’s engagement with objects that are high in information value and their ability to tolerate uncertainty (Henderson & Moore, 1980). We will present pairs of toys that differ in (1) complexity, (2) novelty (e.g., car vs. unusual toy), or (3) uncertainty (in a transparent vs. opaque container) and give children a chance to manually explore them. Two information seeking tasks will capture interest in learning from others. In one task, children will meet two puppets - one who labels objects correctly and one who labels incorrectly (Begus & Southgate, 2012). We will then present a series of novel objects and give children the opportunity to request information from the puppets. In a second task, children will be introduced to several novel objects - some with and some without labels. The objects will then be displayed and children will have the opportunity to request information from the experimenter or their caregiver (Kovács et al., 2014). Finally, we will examine children’s exploration in a free play task. Children will explore a multidimensional “curiosity box” with a variety of functions (e.g., connected toys) (Bonawitz et al., 2011).

An exploratory factor analysis with the curiosity scores (Table 1) treated appropriately for scale will be used to determine whether the indicators of curiosity load onto a single underlying factor, or are best captured by multiple factors. Exploratory analyses will examine relations between curiosity, demographic factors, and child characteristics. Results will advance our ability to measure fine-grained individual differences in early curiosity, laying a foundation for examining its development and mechanisms.

Authors

• Julie Vaisarova, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Nayen Lee, Arizona State University

• Kelsey Lucca, Arizona State University