Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers.

During exploration, young children often show an intuitive sensitivity to uncertainty, despite their strong tendency towards overconfidence in their explicit judgments. Here, we examine the development of children's explicit and implicit recognition of uncertainty using the same stimuli. We presented 4- and 5-year-olds with objects that varied in their amount of perceptual occlusion, and assessed their ability to distinguish among them using two types of measures. Experiment 1 used a traditional 3-point confidence scale to examine children's explicit uncertainty judgments. We compared these confidence judgments before and after they observed disconfirming evidence, to assess the impact of this experience on their acknowledgement of uncertainty in later trials. Experiment 2 examined children's exploration preference as a measure of implicit sensitivity to uncertainty. Our results indicate that children intuitively recognize gaps in their knowledge, and that this implicit recognition may be leveraged to support their explicit judgments. Specifically, we found that children's baseline confidence judgments improved significantly following the presentation of disconfirming evidence. Furthermore, when asked to make exploration decisions about the same set of objects, children showed a spontaneous sensitivity to uncertainty, prior to any evidence. Taken together, these results suggest that children's exploration behavior may be used as an early developing measure of uncertainty control and raise the intriguing possibility that the experience of unexpected outcomes may play a role in the development of metacognition.

Motor-symptom laterality affects acquisition in Parkinson's disease: A cognitive and functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Asymmetric onset of motor symptoms in PD can affect cognitive function. We examined whether motor-symptom laterality could affect feedback-based associative learning and explored its underlying neural mechanism by functional magnetic resonance imaging in PD patients. METHODS: We recruited 63 early-stage medication-naïve PD patients (29 left-onset medication-naïve patients, 34 right-onset medication-naïve patients) and 38 matched normal controls. Subjects completed an acquired equivalence task (including acquisition, retention, and generalization) and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans. Learning accuracy and response time in each phase of the task were recorded for behavioral measures. Regional homogeneity was used to analyze resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data, with regional homogeneity lateralization to evaluate hemispheric functional asymmetry in the striatum. RESULTS: Left-onset patients made significantly more errors in acquisition (feedback-based associative learning) than right-onset patients and normal controls, whereas right-onset patients performed as well as normal controls. There was no significant difference among these three groups in the accuracy of either retention or generalization phase. The three groups did not show significant differences in response time. In the left-onset group, there was an inverse relationship between acquisition errors and regional homogeneity in the right dorsal rostral putamen. There were no significant regional homogeneity changes in either the left or the right dorsal rostral putamen in right-onset patients when compared to controls. CONCLUSIONS: Motor-symptom laterality could affect feedback-based associative learning in PD, with left-onset medication-naïve patients being selectively impaired. Dysfunction in the right dorsal rostral putamen may underlie the observed deficit in associative learning in patients with left-sided onset.© 2016 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

Learners' causal intuitions explain behavior in control of variables tasks.

Self-directed learners are described as "intuitive scientists," yet they often struggle in assessments of their scientific reasoning skills. We investigate a novel explanation for this apparent gap between formal and informal scientific inquiry behavior. Specifically, we consider whether learners' documented failure to correctly apply the control of variables strategy might stem from a mismatch between task presentation and their intuitions as causal learners. In Experiment 1, children (7- and 9-year-olds) and adults were tested on a version of a traditional multivariate reasoning task (Tschirgi, 1980) that was modified to clarify ambiguous elements of the causal logic in the original design. In all age groups, a significant majority of participants selected informative experiments on this modified task, avoiding confounded actions with positive tangible outcomes. In Experiment 2, we replicate these results with real-world stimuli, and in Experiments 3 and 4, we provide direct evidence that self-directed learners apply specific causal intuitions to experimentation tasks. Together, these findings support a novel alternative interpretation of the apparently paradoxical gap between learners' success in informal exploration and their error-prone experimentation-both behaviors are consistent with an intuitively causal approach to scientific inquiry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

What's in the Box? Preschoolers Consider Ambiguity, Expected Value, and Information for Future Decisions in Explore-Exploit Tasks.

Self-directed exploration in childhood appears driven by a desire to resolve uncertainties in order to learn more about the world. However, in adult decision-making, the choice to explore new information rather than exploit what is already known takes many factors beyond uncertainty (such as expected utilities and costs) into account. The evidence for whether young children are sensitive to complex, contextual factors in making exploration decisions is limited and mixed. Here, we investigate whether modifying uncertain options influences explore-exploit behavior in preschool-aged children (48-68 months). Over the course of three experiments, we manipulate uncertain options' ambiguity, expected value, and potential to improve epistemic state for future exploration in a novel forced-choice design. We find evidence that young children are influenced by each of these factors, suggesting that early, self-directed exploration involves sophisticated, context-sensitive decision-making under uncertainty.

Rethinking the "gap": Self-directed learning in cognitive development and scientific reasoning.

To improve upon their current knowledge, learners must be able to generate informative data and accurately evaluate this evidence. However, there is substantial disagreement regarding self-directed learners' competence in these behaviors. Researchers in cognitive development have suggested that learners are "intuitive scientists," generating informative actions and rationally coordinating their current observations and prior beliefs from an early age. Conversely, researchers in scientific reasoning report that learners struggle with experimentation and often fail to reach appropriate conclusions from evidence, even as adults. According to the prevailing narrative, these inconsistent findings must be "bridged" to explain the gap between learners' successes and failures. Here, we advocate for an alternative approach. First, we review the research on scientific reasoning and find that there may be less evidence for learners' failures than is typically assumed. Second, we offer a novel interpretation that aims to account for both literatures: we suggest that self-directed learners may be best understood as competent causal reasoners. That is, many seemingly uninformative or irrational behaviors are consistent with the goals of causal learning. This account not only resolves the apparent contradictions in the existing research, but also offers a way forward towards a more accurate and integrated understanding of self-directed learning. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Psychology > Learning Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making.

A Tale of Three Platforms: Investigating Preschoolers' Second-Order Inferences Using In-Person, Zoom, and Lookit Methodologies.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, online methodologies for developmental research have become an essential norm. Already, there are numerous options for recruiting and testing developmental participants, and they differ from each other in a variety of ways. While recent research has discussed the potential benefits and practical trade-offs of these different platforms, the potential empirical consequences of choosing among them are still unknown. It is critical for the field to understand not only how children's performance in an online context compares to traditional settings, but also how it differs across online platforms. This study offers the first comparative look at the same developmental task across different online research methodologies, allowing for direct comparison and critical examination of each. We conducted three versions of a test of preschoolers' ability to generate and apply second-order inferences to predict novel outcomes. Experiment 1 is an in-person task conducted at public testing sites in the vicinity of the university. In Experiment 2, we conducted an online-moderated version of the same task, in which an experimenter presented a recording of the procedure during a live video call with families over Zoom. Finally, Experiment 3 is an online-unmoderated version of the task, in which the same videos were presented entirely asynchronously using the Lookit platform. Results suggest that online methodologies may introduce difficulties and age-related differences in young children's performance not observed in person. We consider these results in light of the previous online developmental replications, suggest possible interpretations, and offer initial recommendations to help future developmental scientists make informed choices about whether and how to conduct their research online.

Informative experimentation in intuitive science: Children select and learn from their own causal interventions.

We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task. Four- to six-year-olds were presented with a novel system composed of gears that could operate according to two possible causal structures (single or multiple cause). Given the choice between interventions (i.e., removing one of the two gears to observe the remaining gear in isolation), children demonstrated a clear preference for the action that revealed the true causal structure, and made subsequent causal judgments that were consistent with the outcome observed. Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that performance was driven by children's tendency to select an intervention that would produce a desirable effect (i.e., spinning gears), rather than to disambiguate the causal structure. These results replicate our initial findings in a context in which the informative action was less likely to produce a positive outcome than the uninformative one. Experiment 3 serves as a control demonstrating that children's success in the previous experiments is not due to their use of low-level strategies. We discuss these findings in terms of their significance for understanding the development of scientific reasoning and the role of self-directed actions in early causal learning.