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Preschoolers' information search strategies : Inefficient but adaptive
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
active learning
cognitive development
efficiency
information search
strategy
General Psychology
cognitive development
efficiency
information search
strategy
General Psychology
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/26718
Abstract
Although children's sensitivity to others' informativeness emerges early in life, their active information search becomes robustly efficient only around age 10. Young children's difficulty in asking efficient questions has often been hypothesized to be linked to their developing verbal competence and growing vocabulary. In this paper, we offer for the first time a quantitative analysis of 4- to 6-year-old children's information search competence by using a non-verbal version of the 20-questions game, to gain a more comprehensive and fair picture of their active learning abilities. Our results show that, even in this version, preschoolers performed worse than simulated random agents, requiring more queries to reach the solution. However, crucially, preschoolers performed better than the simulated random agents when isolating the extra, unnecessary queries, which are made after only one hypothesis is left. When additionally isolating all the unnecessary queries, children's performance looked on par with that of the simulated optimal agents. Our study replicates and enriches previous research, showing an increase in efficiency across the preschool-aged years, but also a general lack of optimality that seems to be fundamentally driven by children's strong tendency to make unnecessary queries, rather than by their verbal immaturity. We discuss how children's non-optimal, conservative information-search strategies may be adaptive, after all.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2023-01-04
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1080755