About this session

Saturday, 10:20 AM - 11:50 AM

Novel Approaches to Measuring Curiosity and Related Processes in Infants and Children

Children’s curiosity, exploration, and creativity play a critical role in supporting early learning and development (Chu & Schulz, 2020). While there is broad interest in creating environments and engaging in practices that foster these foundational learning skills, research and intervention work have been limited by overlapping operationalizations of these constructs and a lack of gold-standard measures that capture individual differences in young learners (Beisly, 2023; Evans & Jirout, 2023; Kidd & Hayden, 1995). This symposium highlights novel approaches to assessing curiosity and related processes. The first presentation represents work that leverages both physiological responses (EEG) and behavior (gaze patterns) to study toddlers' abilities to predict informative events and also to track their own uncertainty. This work advances how infants’ direct attention to explanatory causal information and provides insights into the neural mechanisms and abilities underlying learning and curiosity. The second presentation showcases the study of infants’ and toddlers’ active (e.g., manual exploration) and passive (e.g., looking-based) information-seeking behaviors while engaging with seven behavioral tasks. This work identifies how children’s information seeking relates to exploration behaviors and examines distinct profiles of curiosity behaviors. The third presentation summarizes validation of novel tasks designed to assess creative thinking and curiosity behaviors in preschoolers using both verbal and nonverbal indices. The last presentation features development of a new, child-reported survey of curiosity, creativity, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and school enjoyment with elementary school students that yielded an invariant factor structure across age and parental education. Together, these studies provide new directions for research and practice.

Paper #1
Title	Curious from day one: A new behavioral task battery to assess infants’ curiosity
Presenting author	Julie Vaisarova, Ph.D., Arizona State University, United States

Paper #2
Title	New methodological tools for measuring curiosity in infancy
Presenting author	Cécile Gal, Centre for Early Childhood Cognition, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Paper #3
Title	Development and Validation of Novel Measures of Curiosity and Creative Thinking in Preschoolers
Presenting author	Maya Provcenal, Stanford University, U.S.

Paper #4
Title	From curiosity to creativity: Exploring intellectual virtues in childhood
Presenting author	Natalie Evans, Ph.D., University of Virginia, United States

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Session chair
Jelena Obradovic, Ph.D., Stanford University, United States

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