About this paper symposium

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Panel information
Panel 4. Cognitive Processes

Paper #1
Curious from day one: A new behavioral task battery to assess infants’ curiosity
Author information	Role
Julie Vaisarova, Ph.D., Arizona State University, United States	Presenting author
Natalia Gonzalez, Arizona State University, United States	Non-presenting author
Madison Saldano, Arizona State University, United States	Non-presenting author
Subhana Siddiqui, Arizona State University, United States	Non-presenting author
Christina Stewart, Arizona State University, United States	Non-presenting author
Kelsey Lucca, Arizona State University, United States	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Curiosity, the drive to gain new information, is a critical engine of learning and discovery. However, our current understanding of factors that can cultivate curiosity early in life is limited by a lack of validated measures. Self-report measures used with older children and adults are inappropriate for infants and toddlers, and parent-report measures can be vulnerable to bias. To fill this gap, the current study adapted seven developmentally appropriate behavioral tasks that assess young children’s information-seeking across multiple behavioral modalities and information types. We aimed to examine the covariance of these behaviors, to better understand the dimensionality of early curiosity. If the behaviors appear to reflect a single underlying factor, this would suggest early information-seeking is motivated by a shared mechanism. If, however, they show evidence of multidimensionality, this would suggest different expressions of early curiosity are shaped by more differentiated processes. 153 children between the ages of 12 and 36 months (M=22.04 months, SD=7.11) completed seven behavioral tasks in which they had the opportunity to gain information from two stimuli - one high and one low in potential information gain. Different tasks presented the opportunity to learn different types of information: explanations for surprising events, affordances of new toys, contents of opaque containers, and labels for novel objects. We observed children’s active (e.g., manual exploration) and passive (e.g., looking-based) information-seeking behaviors, and computed difference scores reflecting their preference to engage with the high-information stimulus over the low-information one (see Table 1 for tasks and measures). As described in Table 1, higher scores indicated a greater preference to engage with (explore, look at, or request information about) the high-information stimulus. On average, children showed a statistically significant preference for the higher-information choice on seven behavioral measures of information-seeking across four tasks (see Figure 1): violation of expectations about solidity, violation of expectations about probability, novelty/familiarity preference, and high/low complexity preference (note that exploration time coding for the preference for complexity and violation of expectations about probability tasks is ongoing, so analyses for these variables are based on approximately 89% of the final sample). There were, however, very few associations between children’s curiosity scores across tasks, or associations between these scores and their general propensity to explore a new stimulus (assessed using a multifunctional “curiosity box,” adapted from Bonawitz et al., 2011). When all data are coded, we will conduct an exploratory factor analysis to assess the underlying dimensionality of these behavioral curiosity measures. We also plan to use a person-centered approach to examine whether young children’s curiosity might be better described in terms of qualitatively distinct profiles than quantitative dimensions. For instance, children who derive joy from simply gaining new information about their environment (so-called interest-type curiosity; Litman, 2008) might express their curiosity differently across our task battery than children who are more motivated by a desire to fill specific gaps in their knowledge (deprivation-type curiosity). This infant “curiosity battery” will support future efforts to understand the early development of curiosity and identify factors that can help promote its development.

Paper #2
New methodological tools for measuring curiosity in infancy
Author information	Role
Cécile Gal, Centre for Early Childhood Cognition, University of Copenhagen, Denmark	Presenting author
Elizabeth Bonawitz, Harvard University, United States	Non-presenting author
Katarina Begus, University of Copenhagen, Denmark	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Curiosity is arguably a core feature of human intelligence -- helping direct our attention to events that are most likely to provide opportunities for learning and resolving uncertainty. Although a vast literature has demonstrated that infants have an impressive ability to select information to support learning, most of this work has focused on infants reacting to events such as violations of expectations, prediction errors, and social cues to guide attention. But there are many cases in which events have not yet come to pass, but one may benefit from evaluating whether the anticipated event is likely to be informative. In two studies, we will present a novel approach to understanding curiosity for future events in infancy. By measuring both physiological responses (EEG) and behavior (gaze patterns), we can study toddlers' abilities to predict informative events and also to track their own uncertainty. In the first study, we explored 16-month-old infants’ sensitivity to the informativeness of evidence and its potential link to infants’ ability to draw accurate causal inferences and predict unfolding events. Infants first were trained on causal events (e.g. green blocks activating a machine, and orange blocks on their own do nothing, but do not hinder the machine activating when paired with a green.) Then infants were introduced to a novel block that had lost its color, paired with either a green or orange block about to be placed on the machine; this created either a potential confounded or unconfounded event. We measured infants' theta responses just before the novel block was placed on the machine; and also measured infants predictive looking to sorting locations for the novel block after seeing the machine activation. Data from 66 infants revealed significantly increased theta oscillatory activity when infants expected to see causally unconfounded evidence compared to confounded evidence, suggesting heightened cognitive engagement in anticipation of informative evidence. Crucially, this difference was more pronounced in the subset of infants who later made correct predictions. This research sheds light on infants’ curiosity for explanatory causal information, suggesting they can strategically direct attention to situations conducive to acquiring informative evidence. In a second ongoing (current N=110) study, toddlers visually search for a ball hidden under one of three cups displayed on a screen. Using gaze-contingent eye-tracking, toddlers can interact with the display by fixating on a cup to open it and see if the ball is inside. The likelihood of finding the ball is manipulated by making some cups transparent (and visibly empty), creating trials where toddlers can be 100%, 50%, or 33% certain about the ball's location. We track anticipatory theta oscillations before they open a cup and Error-Related Negativity (ERN) after they open either a full or an empty cup. This study has the potential to provide valuable insights into the neural mechanisms and abilities underlying learning and curiosity in young children. By studying a group of key processes together, we hope to better understand how toddlers represent uncertainty, errors, and multiple possibilities to support curiosity.

Paper #3
Development and Validation of Novel Measures of Curiosity and Creative Thinking in Preschoolers
Author information	Role
Maya Provcenal, Stanford University, U.S.	Presenting author
Emma Strouse, Stanford University, U.S.	Non-presenting author
Michael J. Sulik, Stanford University, U.S.	Non-presenting author
Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University, U.S.	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Background: Creative thinking and curiosity have been identified as critically important skills that support early learning (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2022), but are under-utilized as indicators of development and school readiness in preschoolers relative to early literacy and numeracy skills (McCoy & Sabol, 2024). Existing measures of creative thinking and curiosity largely rely on children’s verbal abilities and are decontextualized from children’s lived experiences. This study aims to extend measurement of these learning-related skills by creating and validating new tasks that are developmentally appropriate and grounded in children’s everyday experiences. Method: A sample of 187 preschoolers (M age = 4.59 years, 50% female) were assessed individually at their school. Assessment sessions were limited to 20 minutes to maintain attention and engagement. Table 1 describes the measures of creative thinking and curiosity. Assessments also included tasks measuring verbal skills (naming as many animals as possible in one minute), spatial working memory, and processing speed, and parent and child surveys measuring curiosity and creative thinking. Ongoing development work and data collection is focused on creation and validation of information-seeking and problem solving tasks. Results: Correlations are presented in Table 2. All creative thinking and curiosity measures showed age-related increases. As hypothesized, the new measures of creative thinking had relatively low associations with children's verbal fluency, especially in comparison to Alternative Uses. Positive correlations indicated broad convergence among the four creative thinking tasks. In contrast, the two curiosity tasks were unrelated to each other. We did not observe convergence between the tasks and parent or child surveys of creative thinking or curiosity, suggesting that these methods provide distinct information. There was a gender difference for only one task: for Combine and Design, girls created more objects than boys (Cohen's d = .51, p < .01). Partial correlations indicated that all measures of curiosity and creativity were independent from executive functions (i.e., working memory) while accounting for child age. Discussion: These results indicate that new measures of creative thinking show promising validity, however, more work is needed to develop a reliable and valid battery of curiosity and related learning skills that can be used to study early learning.

Paper #4
From curiosity to creativity: Exploring intellectual virtues in childhood
Author information	Role
Natalie Evans, Ph.D., University of Virginia, United States	Presenting author
Jamie Jirout, University of Virginia, United States	Non-presenting author
Virginia Vitiello, University of Virginia, United States	Non-presenting author
Erik Ruzek, University of Virginia, United States	Non-presenting author
Natalie Hutchins, University of Virginia, United States	Non-presenting author
Abstract
Curiosity, along with other intellectual virtues, like open-mindedness, creativity, and intellectual courage, drives the motivation to learn, making it a cornerstone of lifelong education (Baehr, 2013). With advancing knowledge and technology, children need motivation to seek the unknown and find new, different, and better ways of understanding and doing things (Duschl & Osborne, 2002), necessitating the prioritization of promoting curiosity and related attributes in educational contexts alongside traditional performance outcomes. Yet, curiosity is challenging to operationalize and measure (Author Cite), and difficult to measure quickly in large samples, as needed for conducting longitudinal education and developmental research. The current study explores whether curiosity can be measured along with and as distinct from related constructs and tests those associations (creativity, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, school enjoyment) using children’s self-perceptions. Children’s perceptions of their experiences influence their learning (Schenke, 2008) and can be reliably measured even in young children (Author Cite). Children ages 5-10 (N=389) self-reported their curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, academic courage, and open-mindedness on a computer survey using a five-point graphical scale (increasing sized blocks and hand gestures indicating magnitude). Questions were presented both auditorily and in text on a tablet or computer. Children participated either online or in school. To evaluate the current scale structure, exploratory graph analysis (EGA; Golino & Epskamp, 2017) was used to account for expected high correlations across the different constructs. In this method, network modeling approaches that employ regularization are utilized along with random walk algorithms to help determine the dimensionality of the scale. The EGA network plot using the Walktrap algorithm is shown in Figure 1. The model suggests distinct subscales for 1) curiosity (cscu), 2) school enjoyment (cssle), 3) creativity (cscr), 4) positive feelings about teachers (csfat), and 5) several items from the open-mindedness (csomt) and intellectual courage scales (csac), which align with current definitions of intellectual humility (Porter et al., 2022). Utilizing the factor structure identified in the EGA results, we employed exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM; Asparouhov & Muthén, 2009) to assess whether the factors and items are invariant across relevant demographic groups. MIMIC models within ESEM (Marsh et al., 2014) were employed and revealed that the factor structure was invariant across children of varying ages and across children from families with different levels of education. Mean differences were found only for age, in which a child’s age was associated with slightly higher latent mean scores on the intellectual humility scale (b(se)=0.03 (0.01) [0.004, 0.05]). Table 1 shows the latent factor correlations from the ESEM model. As expected, most of the variables correlate, including a relation between curiosity with creativity, school enjoyment, positive feelings about teacher, and the combined scale we consider to be indicating intellectual humility. These results provide support for the use of the developed measure in children as young as five to assess the dimensions of curiosity, creativity, intellectual humility, and school enjoyment. Research can use this scale to explore the developmental trajectory of these constructs over time and their role in learning.

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