Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study explores developmental changes in the ability toask informative questions. We hypothesized an intrinsic linkbetween the ability to update beliefs in light of evidence andthe ability to ask informative questions. Four- to ten-year-oldchildren played an iPad game asking them to identify a hiddenbug. Learners could either ask about individual bugs, or makea series of feature queries (e.g., “Does the hidden bug haveantenna?”) that could more efficiently narrow the hypothesisspace. Critically the task display either helped children inte-grate evidence with the hypothesis space or required them toperform this operation themselves. Although we found thathelping children update their beliefs improved some aspects oftheir active inquiry behavior, children required to update theirown beliefs asked questions that were more context-sensitiveand thus informative. The results show how making a taskmore difficult may actually improve children’s active inquiryskills, thus illustrating a type of desirable difficulty.