Peer-reviewed article
Preschoolers use exploratory approaches to selective social learning.
Carolyn M Palmquist, Mary A Gum, Yareli Calderon Romero ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined how 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers decide which people to learn from and what information they seek before making that choice. Children and adults were given the opportunity to learn three types of information about potential teachers: what they know, how they treat friends, or what they look like. While adults efficiently prioritized learning what people know, children explored all types of information equally and used broad information-seeking strategies rather than narrowing their choices efficiently. The findings suggest that young children use exploratory rather than targeted approaches when learning about and evaluating other people.
Key points
- Adults prioritized epistemic information (what informants know) and used efficient information-seeking strategies
- Preschoolers chose each type of cue (epistemic, benevolence, appearance) at relatively equal rates
- Children employed exploratory strategies, sampling broadly from available information rather than selecting minimally
- Children's exploratory approach persisted even when appearance and benevolence cues were made less informative
- The study raises questions about how children make inferences about others' reliability as sources of information
Limitations
The study does not specify the country or cultural context where the research was conducted, and it does not examine whether exploratory information-seeking strategies have practical benefits or drawbacks for children's learning outcomes in real-world settings.
Abstract
Preschoolers evaluate many cues when making inferences about others (Harris et al., 2018). It is unclear whether children's understanding of inference-making is sophisticated enough that they alsoseek outthe most relevant cues for making specific inferences. Here, we tasked 4- and 5-year-olds and adults with a modified epistemic trust paradigm in which they were told to select one of two informants to help them learn about novel objects. However, before doing so, participants were told that they could learn up to three pieces of information about the informants: what they know (epistemic cue), how they play with their friends (benevolence cue), or what they look like (appearance cue). Of particular interest was which cue participants prioritized (picked first) and what strategies they used for seeking information. In Study 1, adults prioritized learning epistemic information and tended to employ efficient information-seeking strategies (selecting the fewest cues possible to make their inferences). Children, on the other hand, chose each cue first at relatively equal rates and tended to employ exploratory strategies for information-seeking (sampling broadly from the available information). This was even the case in Study 2, in which the informativeness of the appearance and benevolence cues was reduced. These studies raise questions about the way in which children make inferences about others and point to a tendency for children to employ exploratory strategies for learning about others (Gopnik, 2020).