Everyday interactions support toddlers' learning of conventional actions on artifacts

Pedagogy Does Not Necessarily Constrain Exploration: Investigating Preschoolers' Information Search During Instructed Exploration

Pedagogy is seen as a "double-edged sword": it efficiently conveys information but may constrain the exploration of the causal structure of objects, suggesting that pedagogy and exploration are mutually exclusive learning processes. However, research on children's active involvement in concept acquisition implies that pedagogical signals could facilitate exploratory behavior, indicating a complementary relationship. To understand the link between them, we designed an object exploration task for preschool-aged children featuring between-subject conditions of pedagogical exploration or pedagogical demonstration. Our findings suggest that if the use of the toy is not demonstrated to children and they are allowed to discover the evidence independently, pedagogical signals do not restrict subsequent exploratory behavior. These results imply that pedagogy and exploration complement each other, with pedagogical signals highlighting the relevant evidence and exploratory behavior enriching knowledge by fostering learning from individual experiences.

Active control over exploration improves memory in toddlers

Across two experiments, we implemented a novel gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigm to investigate the early emergence of memory benefits from active control over exploration and to examine how exploratory behaviours affect memory formation in early development. Toddlers (experiment 1: n = 36, 18-36 months; experiment 2: n = 41, 23-36 months) were either allowed to actively control their exploration (active condition) or presented with the same information that they could only passively observe (passive condition in experiment 1; yoked condition in experiment 2). They were then tested in a preferential-looking paradigm in which familiar versus novel stimuli were presented in pairs. Evidence from eye-movement patterns indicates that toddlers demonstrate improved recognition memory when given active control over learning. Toddlers' pace of learning (i.e. visitation rate) explains the recognition improvement in their active exploration. Their memory improvement is also related to individual differences in the systematicity of exploratory behaviour (i.e. sequence entropy). These findings suggest that toddlers exhibit more sophisticated exploratory strategies than previously believed, revealing the early emergence and development of their ability to adapt these strategies to enhance memory and therefore support learning.

Object play in Tajikistan: Infants engage with objects despite bounds on play

Object play is a ubiquitous context for learning. Existing knowledge on infant object interaction has relied on Euro-American samples and observations confined to laboratory playrooms or families' homes, where object play is typically observed indoors and in rooms brimming with toys. Here we examined infants' everyday object play in Tajikistan, where spaces are uniquely laid out and homes are not child-centered and toy-abundant. The restrictive gahvora cradling practice in Tajikistan may indirectly shape how infants access and engage with objects. We documented how much time infants spent in object play, the types and diversity of objects they contacted, and the locations of play-indoors or outside. We observed 59 infants (12-24 months) during a 45-min naturalistic observation when infants were out of the gahvora. Infants engaged with objects 50% of the time. Despite a lack of object diversity, object interactions were frequent and dispersed throughout observations. Walkers tended to divide their object interactions between time spent indoors and outside, but pre-walkers mostly interacted with objects indoors. Caregivers inadvertently shape infants' opportunities for exploration and play through culturally guided childrearing practices. And infants make due: they take it upon themselves to move, explore, and engage-gleaning culturally relevant routines.

People overlook subtractive changes differently depending on age, culture, and task

Previous work has explored transformative strategies that adds or removes components to change an original structure or state, and showed that adults tend to search for additive solutions far more often than subtractive ones. In the current study, we replicated a Lego building task and a grid-based symmetry task from a previous study, and also introduced a novel digital puzzle task. We investigated limitations in the previous study as well as extended the investigation of the subtraction neglect in a sample of children and across two cultures. Results partially confirm previous results, and extends the literature by showing that 9-10 year old children were more likely to ignore subtractive transformations than adults. However, we found both task-based and cultural variations in strategy use in adults from Sweden and the USA. We conclude that a subtraction neglect involves complex cognitive processes that are dependent on the task, culture, and age.

How mothers help children learn to use everyday objects

Children must learn specific motor actions to use everyday objects as their designers intended. However, designed actions are not obvious to children and often are difficult to implement. Children must know what actions to do and how to execute them. Previous work identified a protracted developmental progression in learning designed actions-from nondesigned exploratory actions, to display of the designed action, to successful implementation. Presumably, caregivers can help children to overcome the challenges in discovering and implementing designed actions. Mothers of 12-, 18- to 24-, and 30- to 36-month-olds (N = 74) were asked to teach their children to open containers with twist-off or pull-off lids. Mothers' manual and verbal input aligned with the developmental progression and with children's actions in the moment, pointing to the role of attuned social information in helping children learn to use objects for activities of daily living. However, mothers sometimes "overhelped" by implementing designed actions for children instead of getting children to do it themselves, highlighting the challenges of teaching novices difficult motor actions.

Toddlers' action learning and memory from active and observed instructions

From early in life, children learn to perform actions on the objects in their environments. Although children learn from observing others' actions, actively engaging with the material to be learned can be important for learning. This study tested whether instruction that included opportunities for children to be active supported toddlers' action learning. In a within-participants design, 46 22- to 26-month-old toddlers (average age = 23.3 months; 21 male) were introduced to target actions for which instruction was either active or observed (instruction order counterbalanced across children). During active instruction, toddlers were coached to perform a set of target actions. During observed instruction, toddlers saw a teacher perform the actions. Toddlers were then tested on their action learning and generalization. Surprisingly, action learning and generalization did not differ between instruction conditions. However, toddlers' cognitive maturity supported their learning from both types of instruction. One year later, children from the original sample were tested on their long-term memory for information learned from active and observed instructions. Of this sample, 26 children provided usable data for the follow-up memory task (average age = 36.7 months, range = 33-41; 12 male). Children demonstrated better memory for information learned from active instruction than for information learned from observed instruction (odds ratio = 5.23) 1 year after instruction. Active experience during instruction appears to be pivotal for supporting children's long-term memory.