Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although persistence is essential to overcoming challenges andmaking new discoveries, continued effort can be costly. Evenvery young learners must make decisions about when to investeffort and when to abandon a task. In the current study, weexplore whether children’s decisions about when to exert effortare influenced by the information they stand to gain in aparticular learning situation. That is, we examine whetherproviding children with solutions after they attempt tocomplete a challenging task reduces their persistence. Sixty 4-and 5-year-old children completed a series of iSpy puzzles andthen attempted to activate a novel toy. Children were eitherpresented with the solutions after attempting each task or givenno information about the answers. Our results demonstrate thatchildren persisted longer at attempting to activate a novel toywhen their effort was more likely to be the only source ofinformation: children who expected to be provided with thesolution gave up faster than those who did not. We discuss theimplications of these findings on children’s rational decisionsabout when effort is worthwhile, and consider how providinganswers might impact motivation and curiosity more broadly.