Children’s exploratory play tracks the discriminability of hypotheses
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s41467-021-23431-2.pdf
Description
Published version
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1.72 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Siegel, Max H
Magid, Rachel W
Pelz, Madeline
Tenenbaum, Joshua B
Schulz, Laura E
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Siegel, Max H, Magid, Rachel W, Pelz, Madeline, Tenenbaum, Joshua B and Schulz, Laura E. 2021. "Children’s exploratory play tracks the discriminability of hypotheses." Nature Communications, 12 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Effective curiosity-driven learning requires recognizing that the value of evidence for testing hypotheses depends on what other hypotheses are under consideration. Do we intuitively represent the discriminability of hypotheses? Here we show children alternative hypotheses for the contents of a box and then shake the box (or allow children to shake it themselves) so they can hear the sound of the contents. We find that children are able to compare the evidence they hear with imagined evidence they do not hear but might have heard under alternative hypotheses. Children (N = 160; mean: 5 years and 4 months) prefer easier discriminations (Experiments 1-3) and explore longer given harder ones (Experiments 4-7). Across 16 contrasts, children’s exploration time quantitatively tracks the discriminability of heard evidence from an unheard alternative. The results are consistent with the idea that children have an “intuitive psychophysics”: children represent their own perceptual abilities and explore longer when hypotheses are harder to distinguish.
MIT Department
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-021-23431-2
