ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Young children communicate their ignorance and ask questions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Two-year-olds' visual exploration of response options during memory decisions predicts metamemory monitoring one year later.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Young children share imagined possibilities: evidence for an early-emerging human competence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- People infer communicative action through an expectation for efficient communication.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Therapeutic Alliance as Active Inference: The Role of Therapeutic Touch and Synchrony.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Therapeutic Alliance as Active Inference: The Role of Therapeutic Touch and Biobehavioural Synchrony in Musculoskeletal Care.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Exploring individual differences in infants' looking preferences for impossible events: The Early Multidimensional Curiosity Scale.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Response latencies and eye gaze provide insight on how toddlers gather evidence under uncertainty.Nature human behaviour · 2020Article
- A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- The extension of biology through culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Toddlers' visual exploration during decisions predicts uncertainty monitoring 1 year later.Child developmentArticle
- Infants Assume Questions Serve an Information-Seeking Function, Link Them to Interrogative Sentences and Differentiate Them From Assertions.Child developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Children acquire information, especially about the culture in which they are being raised, by listening to other people. Recent evidence has shown that young children are selective learners who preferentially accept information, especially from informants who are likely to be representative of the surrounding culture. However, the extent to which children understand this process of information transmission and actively exploit it to fill gaps in their knowledge has not been systematically investigated. We review evidence that toddlers exhibit various expressive behaviors when faced with knowledge gaps. They look toward an available adult, convey ignorance via nonverbal gestures (flips/shrugs), and increasingly produce verbal acknowledgments of ignorance ("I don't know"). They also produce comments and questions about what their interlocutors might know and adopt an interrogative stance toward them. Thus, in the second and third years, children actively seek information from interlocutors via nonverbal gestures or verbal questions and display a heightened tendency to encode and retain such sought-after information.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.