Curiosity scaffolds children's exploration and learning. Yet, the neural mechanisms of curiosity-modulated learning in children remain unclear. Here, we designed an fMRI task to test how curiosity, as defined by children's self-reported excitement about learning information, modulates memory and neural activity in 5- to 8-year-olds (n = 60 with behavioral data, n = 51 with fMRI). We observed greater learning when children reported more curiosity. In whole-brain analyses, high-curiosity was associated with greater activation in inferior frontal gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, the thalamus, and the putamen. Curiosity did not modulate activation in preregistered regions of interest (dorsal attention network, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens) but did modulate activation in an exploratory region of interest, the amygdala. Multivariate searchlight decoding revealed local activity patterns that reliably distinguished reported curiosity levels in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, angular gyrus, precuneus, and cerebellum. Together, these findings are consistent with prior work on curiosity-related activation during information receipt in adults, suggesting that neural systems that support curiosity-driven learning are already engaged in early childhood.

People’s behavior can be roughly categorized into two modes: reflective and thoughtful, or automatic and rote. Past work on Theory of Mind has focused on how children reason about the first category of behavior. But do children also notice when other people are acting in an automatic way? And if so, when might this matter? This paper examined 5- to 10-year-old children’s reasoning about others’ rote behavior, mainly focusing on the consequences of this inference in teaching contexts (N = 660 across four studies, 327 girls; data collected online from U.S.-based children between May 2022 and December 2024). Children’s sensitivity to apparent rote behavior increased with development, with more consistent inferences emerging around age 7. Rote behavior was also associated with worse teaching. These results indicate when and how reasoning about automatic behavior matters to children’s perception of others, and suggest novel extensions to models of Theory of Mind.

Parental involvement plays an important role in children's learning within everyday social contexts. This study investigated whether and how a brief instructional intervention affected parent-child interactions during play, and how parents' and children's behaviors impacted children's learning during the play and subsequent independent exploration. Parents and their 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 72) engaged with causal toys, with parents pseudo-randomly assigned to one of three conditions: teaching (teach the child), helping (help the child), or noinvolvement (watch the child). During the Interactive Phase, parent-child dyads had four minutes to explore the toys and figure out the causal rule together. This was followed by the Independent Phase, in which children explored a different set of toys with a new causal rule on their own for three minutes. Children's learning outcomes were assessed after each phase. Results indicated that parents in the no-involvement condition asked fewer questions and provided less feedback and encouragement compared to those in the teaching and helping conditions. However, there were no significant differences in parental behaviors between the helping and teaching groups. In terms of learning outcomes, children in the teaching condition had a higher success rate than those in the no-involvement condition. Across all conditions, parents' use of questioning (particularly pedagogical questions) and guidance in helping children generate evidence during the interaction predicted better learning outcomes for children. These improved learning outcomes were even observed following children's independent exploration, suggesting that guidance (particularly in the form of pedagogical questions) supports "learning to learn".

Curiosity is widely regarded as a fundamental driver of learning, with information-seeking behavior serving as one key mechanism linking the two. To date, research has largely focused on overt, proactive information seeking, although in many non-Western classroom contexts, curiosity may instead be expressed through socially permissible attentive behaviors (e.g., focused listening). Moreover, little is known about the cognitive and socioemotional mechanisms that shape how curiosity translates into different forms of information seeking. Based on data from 701 Grade 1 students in Nepal (45% female; Mage = 6.46 years), we found that children’s curiosity, measured by willingness-to-pay and breadth-of-exploration scores, predicts proactive information seeking (e.g., question asking), with stronger associations among students higher in social confidence and executive function. Curiosity, measured by willingness-to-pay and depth-of-exploration scores, also predicts attentive information seeking, with these associations being stronger among children with higher executive function. Together, these results indicate that curiosity operates as a motivational factor that interacts with auxiliary socioemotional and cognitive skills to facilitate proactive and attentive information-seeking behaviors in real-world classroom settings. Accordingly, fostering effective learning requires supporting not only curiosity itself but also the skills that enable students to translate their internal drive into contextually appropriate information-seeking.

Identifying how children develop causal understanding of illness transmission is key to fostering effective health behaviors and preventing the spread of contagious diseases. Previous research has shown that children struggle to grasp the invisible nature of germs, complicating their ability to form accurate causal explanations about illness transmission. In light of these challenges, this study examines how causal reasoning develops with age in the context of contagion and contagion-irrelevant domains. Using an online study platform, we presented participants (N = 108, Ages 4-8, North American) with a series of animated vignettes in which four characters were exposed to illness with varying degrees of (a) duration of exposure to a sick individual, (b) proximity to a sick individual, and (c) number of transfers of germs between sick individual and target. In addition, children were presented with three analogous control (contagion-irrelevant) causal reasoning vignettes that mirrored transmission principles of (a) duration, (b) proximity, and (c) number of transfers in nongerm, visible scenarios. Causal reasoning scores increased with age for both contagion-relevant and control vignettes, with contagion causal reasoning lagging behind general causal reasoning ability. The difference between children's performance on control and germ vignettes suggests that the challenges children experience reasoning about germ transmission go beyond understanding transmission processes in general, and may reflect difficulty understanding that germs specifically follow similar mechanisms of transmission. Our results underscore the critical need for targeted educational interventions, especially those focusing on causal mechanisms, to help improve children's reasoning about germs and illness transmission. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

A significant challenge for Bayesian models of cognition is understanding how the abstract assumptions behind these models connect to psychological mechanisms. We examine the consequences of considering one of the psychological processes involved in inductive inference: generating hypotheses. We analyze the predictions of a simple model that separates the processes of generating hypotheses and evaluating those hypotheses. This analysis shows that the ease of generating a hypothesis and its plausibility are confounded if we simply analyze people’s behavior in terms of Bayesian inference without taking the underlying mechanisms into account. We then establish through three experiments that the processes of generation and evaluation are separable, and that influencing the ease of hypothesis generation has different consequences from simply manipulating the plausibility of a hypothesis. These experiments produce results that could not be accounted for by a Bayesian model that assumes people assign a fixed prior probability to hypotheses.

Though children's learning occurs through daily experiences, few studies have examined how variability in those experiences predict day-to-day learning. Here, we explored associations among learning, attention, and parental stress within and across children. Children aged 5-7 (N = 103, M age = 6.3 years) participated in eight virtual science lessons over 2 weeks (N = 813 lessons). Within-child, greater attention during lessons predicted greater learning (d within = .23). Within-child, parent stress was not associated with attention or learning, but across children, greater parent stress was associated with lower attention (d between = -.63). Children's attention (d within = -.21) and science learning (d within = -.24) declined across lessons. Declines in learning were stronger for children whose parents reported higher levels of daily stress (d = -.27). These results suggest that differences in children's science learning may emerge from differences in attention in the moment and variability in learning trajectories over time.

Counterfactual reasoning -- the ability to consider what could, would, or should have happened alongside what actually occurred -- is foundational to causal understanding, learning from experience, and making sense of others’ minds. While this skill emerges in early childhood, its developmental trajectory remains debated. How does this ability develop and what other constructs is it related to? To investigate, we explored the development of counterfactual reasoning through a 14-item unmoderated online battery measuring counterfactual reasoning across narrative, physical, and causal-machine domains in 320 children (ages 3-7). We found steady improvement on the tasks, with performance improving over early to middle childhood. Performance was also positively correlated within all three tasks, controlling for age and performance on non-counterfactual cognitive tasks, suggesting that all three domains were tapping into a similar underlying counterfactual ability. Additionally, children who responded correctly on narrative counterfactuals that could not be solved using heuristic shortcuts performed better across the other counterfactual tasks (Study 1) and Theory of Mind tasks (Study 2). These findings provide evidence for a latent construct underlying counterfactual reasoning and introduce a validated tool for future research.

Here we explore whether adults and children differ in the way they search through a semantic network, and the role those differences may play in hypothesis generation. Participants generated sequential guesses about a novel causal relation. A week later, they completed a similarity spacing task and we measured the average “distance” between guesses. We find that adults show greater dependencies between sequential guesses than preschoolers, and generate a less diverse set of options. These findings may support the idea that development can be viewed as analogous to simulated annealing strategies in machine learning that start “hot” (in early childhood), generating wider and more variable searches, and eventually cool (in adulthood) to generate narrower searches.

Questions may be asked with an intent to acquire new information from the recipient (i.e., information-seeking questions) or with the intent to teach (i.e., pedagogical questions). Understanding how the questions' recipients infer the intent of questions is important, because the recipients' inferences have important consequences for reasoning and learning. In the present series of studies, we tested the hypothesis that i) askers use prosodic cues-an ever-present signal-to encode information-seeking and pedagogical intent both in deliberate and spontaneous speech and that ii) adults and children can draw appropriate inferences about the question's intent on the basis of prosody alone. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that naïve adult listeners and children aged 5 years and above have the capacity to explicitly identify which asker has an intention to teach on the basis of prosody alone. In Experiment 3, we found that parents' spontaneous speech in pedagogical or information-seeking contexts is appropriately recognized by naïve listeners as pedagogical or information-seeking. Thus, the intent of pedagogical and information-seeking questions is acoustically encoded by askers, and it can be appropriately decoded by recipients.

Western educational philosophy has long emphasized the importance of first-hand observation in learning. This view, however, overlooks another important form of learning, sometimes called learning by thinking. Here, we compared three conditions: instruction using thought experiments (Thought Experiments condition), instruction using real experiments (Real Experiments condition), and no instruction (Baseline condition). A total of 100 children (MAge = 84.79 months; 43 girls; predominantly White) were assigned to the conditions. All participants completed a pre-training physics assessment, received physics instruction (Thought and Real Experiments conditions only), and completed a post-training assessment. Results showed that only children in the Real and Thought Experiments conditions improved from pre- to post-training. Critically, there was no significant difference between the two instructional methods.

Although exploratory play is considered a hallmark of cognitive development and learning, relatively few studies have been able to quantitatively characterize the shifts that may occur in children's approach to exploration. One reason for this gap is due to challenges coding and analyzing children's exploratory play behavior. In our paper, we employ a novel computational modeling approach to understand whether and how children's exploratory play patterns shift in early childhood (3- to 11-years-old). We analyze data from children (N = 432) across five different experiments that varied in the type of exploration task (including novel toys, novel topics, and novel envelopes). Children's behaviors were coded action-by-action according to whether children repeated an action on the same type of target, switched to a novel target, or terminated play. Our computational Markov model searches over the space of possible "stay," "switch," and "end" parameters to quantify child-specific transition probabilities. We find that overall, older children are less likely to perseverate, more likely to switch, and more likely to end the task earlier. Our approach provides a demonstration of how Markov models can be used to map the process of play, providing insight into theories of developmental changes in exploration. SUMMARY: We use Markov models to quantify developmental shifts in children's exploratory play across five naturalistic tasks. Older children showed increased exploratory variability and decreased perseveration during play. Developmental effects were most consistent in novel toy tasks, but varied across contexts. Our findings help reconcile conflicting prior research by highlighting the role of task structure and developmental changes in exploratory strategy.

Pedagogy is a powerful way to learn about the world, and young children are adept at both learning from teaching and teaching others themselves. Theoretical accounts of pedagogical reasoning suggest that an important aspect of being an effective teacher is considering what learners need to know, as misconceptions about learners' beliefs, needs, or goals can result in less helpful teaching. One underexplored way in which teachers may fail to represent what learners know is by simply “going through the motions” of teaching, without actively engaging with the learner's beliefs, needs, and goals at all. In the current paper, we replicate ongoing work that suggests children are sensitive to when others are relying on automatic scripts in the context of teaching. We then look at the potential link to two related measures. First, we hypothesize that sensitivity to a teacher's perceived automaticity will be linked to classic measures of pedagogical sensitivity and learning—specifically, how children explore and learn about novel toys following pedagogical vs. non-pedagogical demonstrations. Second, we hypothesize that the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) (and age differences more broadly) relate to these pedagogical sensitivities. Our online adaptation of the novel toy exploration task did not invoke pedagogical reasoning as expected, and so we do not find robust links between these tasks. We do find that ToM predicts children's ability to detect automaticity in teaching when controlling for age. This work thus highlights the connections between sensitivity to teaching and reasoning about others' knowledge, with implications for the factors that support children's ability to teach others.

Can you learn better by doing something yourself (DIY) or by watching somebody else do it? We present a new approach to examine this perennial question in research on learning and instruction. In a science learning task, children aged 5 to 7 years (N = 95) either generated predictions themselves (active condition) or observed the predictions of a fictitious other child (yoked condition) before seeing the outcome. Unlike previous yoked designs, we first emulated responses from a Bayesian learner. Critically, these responses were then individually matched to each yoked child given their unique prior beliefs at the start of the experiment. This novel approach allowed us to discern the effects of DIY on conceptual learning much more clearly than before. We found that actively generating predictions led to deeper conceptual understanding than observing another’s matched predictions, and that this advantage of DIY was associated with an increased experience of agency.

Play is important in many cultures and species, but the basic motivations behind play remain unclear. In two preregistered experiments, we examined what 5- to 10-year-old children (n = 124) think makes play rewarding under internally and externally motivated contexts using a novel game design task. We specifically compared children's choices about how to best configure a novel tossing game when either playing for fun or playing to win. We found that for "win-relevant" variables, children chose easier settings when playing to win than when playing for fun. By contrast, for "win-irrelevant" variables, children generally preferred similar settings across conditions. Children also judged "win-relevant" variables as more important to winning than "win-irrelevant" variables and judged both as irrelevant to having fun. These results suggest that playing to win and playing for fun are distinct motivational contexts to which children can appropriately adapt their decisions during play. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Study events that are congruent with our prior expectations are better remembered than expectation-unrelated events. Paradoxically, events that are highly incongruent with expectations are also better remembered. In this study, we explore whether this paradoxical finding persists in object featural memory. Specifically, we examine whether memory for expectation-congruent and incongruent features of objects is differentially impacted by the processes that underlie recall and recognition and the types of information being probed. In three experiments, we manipulated the degree to which object features adhered to people’s prior expectations (i.e., colors of objects) and then assessed memory (recall and recognition) for expectation-relevant features (i.e., object–color) and expectation-irrelevant features (i.e., object-shape). While both expectation-congruent and incongruent features were equally well recognized, only expectation-congruent features were better recalled compared to expectation-unrelated features. Furthermore, only strong expectation-congruence created a memory advantage for expectation-irrelevant object features. These findings suggest that in object featural memory, expectation-congruence and incongruence are qualitatively dissociable in their impact on recognition and recall processes. The findings from this work have important implications for cognitive and neuroscientific theories of how prior expectations shape the representation of objects and their constituent features in episodic memory.

Children who are more curious learn more in school, but little is known about how to promote curiosity-driven behaviors. In a preregistered experiment, 103 children (54 boys, 49 girls, ages 5–7 years) were randomly assigned to a condition in which they were encouraged to ask questions, or to listen carefully, during eight one-on-one science lessons over 2 weeks. Children in the question-asking condition valued new science information significantly more than children in the listening condition (Wilcoxon r = 0.23). Children with less background knowledge, as measured by their baseline vocabulary and science achievement, showed greater curiosity and learning benefits from question-asking. These results suggest that practice with question-asking can boost some aspects of curiosity and learning in science domains.

When children encounter information about the world that is descriptive (e.g., frequency distributions) or prescriptive (e.g., value judgments), can they keep track of both types of information together? Do they, like adults, integrate these two kinds of information to come up with the "first thing that comes to mind"? Can children separate these types of information when needed? In two experiments, we examined how children (N = 397, ages 4-9 years, fluent English speakers mostly from North America, recruited online) and adults (N = 189, U.S. English speakers, recruited online) produce both "first-to-mind" judgments and predictions about random samples. In Experiment 1, providing information about whether being longer or shorter made a fictional tool better or worse led adults to provide first-to-mind judgments that were biased toward the prescriptive ideal, but unbiased random sample predictions. However, 6-9-year-old children provided judgments that were biased by the prescriptive ideal in both cases. In Experiment 2, with 6-9-year-olds and adults, we manipulated whether the prescriptive information focused exclusively on positive (i.e., only "better") or negative (i.e., only "worse") properties. In the positive-focus condition, all age groups showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on first-to-mind judgments, but only 6-7-year-olds showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on random sample predictions. However, in the negative-focus condition, there was no effect of prescriptive information on either type of judgments for any age group, including adults. We discuss what changes in development in the ability to represent different kinds of information and apply the best kind of information to a specific task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).