ArticleChild development
Exploration in 4-year-old children is guided by learning progress and novelty.
Article in Child development. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. 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.
- Recurrent rectal foreign-body insertion in a child with caregiver-reported problematic short-form video use: A hypothesis-generating case report.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Drivers of exploration early in development: Perceptual novelty rather than a quest for information.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- How Uncertainty Affects Children's Exploration and Exploitation in Statistical Learning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Article
- Development of Uncertainty Sensitivity: Early Competence or Protracted Development?Developmental science · 2026Article
- More Time and Effort, Same Curiosity: Expected Effort Does Not Impact Curiosity.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Immersive, Open-World Virtual Reality for Dementia Care: NeuroVRX Pilot Study.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Chimpanzees and children are curious about social interactions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The role of exploration and exploitation in primate communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Autistic traits foster effective curiosity-driven exploration.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans are driven by an intrinsic motivation to learn, but the developmental origins of curiosity-driven exploration remain unclear. We investigated the computational principles guiding 4-year-old children's exploration during a touchscreen game (N = 102, F = 49, M = 53, primarily white and middle-class, data collected in the Netherlands from 2021-2023). Children guessed the location of characters that were hiding following predictable (yet noisy) patterns. Children could freely switch characters, which allowed us to quantify when they decided to explore something different and what they chose to explore. Bayesian modeling of their responses revealed that children selected activities that were more novel and offered greater learning progress (LP). Moreover, children's interest in making LP correlated with better learning performance. These findings highlight the importance of novelty and LP in guiding children's exploration.
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.