{"pk":25721,"title":"Children search for information as efficiently as adults,\nbut seek additional confirmatory evidence","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Like scientists, children and adults learn by asking questions\nand making interventions. How does this ability develop? We\ninvestigate how children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults\nsearch for information to learn which kinds of objects share a\nnovel causal property. In particular, we consider whether\nchildren ask questions and select interventions that are as\ninformative as those of adults, and whether they recognize\nwhen to stop searching for information to provide a solution.\nWe find an anticipated developmental improvement in\ninformation search efficiency. We also present a formal\nanalysis that allows us to identify the basis for children’s\ninefficiency. In our 20-questions-style task, children initially\nask questions and make interventions no less efficiently than\nadults do, but continue to search for information past the point\nat which they have narrowed their hypothesis space to a\nsingle option. In other words, the performance change from\nage seven to adulthood is due largely to a change in\nimplementing a “stopping rule”; when considering only the\nminimum number of queries participants would have needed\nto identify the correct hypothesis, age differences disappear.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"information search"},{"word":"active learning"},{"word":"20-questions\ngame"},{"word":"Cognitive Development"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dv9f52r","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Azzurra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ruggeri","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of PittsburghUniversity of California, Berkeley; Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""},{"first_name":"Tania","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lombrozo","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Thomas","middle_name":"L","last_name":"Girffiths","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Fei","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25721/galley/15345/download/"}]}