Curiosity is critical for learning, yet, we know little about its mechanisms, development, or sources of variability in this trait. Differences in information seeking behaviours are already evident by age 2, and may be shaped by experience. This project studies the development of curiosity by following 100 infants over 3 visits between age 12 and 24 months. We examine 1) whether infants find information rewarding and are willing to incur costs to obtain it; 2) whether they can strategically adapt their information search based on task difficulty and how their response to errors motivates the search; and 3) how aspects of their social environment (interactions with caregivers) may shape the development of these mechanisms. Using EEG, gaze-responsive eye-tracking, and behavioural measures, we investigate infants' own active search for information and relate the behaviour and neural responses over time. Preliminary results from the first visit (12 months) will be presented.

Distinguishing spurious correlations from unconfounded causal evidence is a challenge in every day reasoning. Adapting the classic “blicket detector” paradigm (Sobel et al., 2014), we investigate whether 15-17-month-old infants’ neural activity (theta oscillations), indicates that infants recognize when the information they are expecting or observing is confounded or not. By concurrently tracking infants’ eye-movements, we investigate also whether infants correctly infer the functionality of unknown objects (when such an inference is possible, i.e. when data is unconfounded) and predict future events based on these causal inferences. Data collection is on-going (current N = 29) and preliminary analysis suggests infants show increased theta activity in anticipation of receiving un-confounded (as opposed to confounded) information. By relating the neural measures of information expectation to the accuracy of infants’ subsequent predictions, we hope to offer a unique insight into the mechanisms, development, and individual differences in early causal reasoning.

Although even infants appear to consider multiple possibilities, preschoolers often fail tasks that require reasoning about mutually exclusive alternatives. We review two explanations for this failure: (1) children have a minimal representation of possibility and fail to distinguish necessary from merely possible outcomes; and (2) children are sensitive to this distinction, but competing motivations (e.g., the tendency to explore) can lead to apparent failures. To test these hypotheses, we assessed 3- and 4-year-olds on a novel search task. Here, children searched for an object that was dropped from either a transparent (one necessary location) or opaque (two possible locations) set of inverted Y-shaped tubes. In Exp. 1, we found that children spent less time searching the first location when there were two possible candidates. Exp. 2 replicates these results in a digital task that does not require manual search.