CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN
COGNITION & NEUROSCIENCES/ConnexConnex

Infants are curious and play an active role in structuring their own learning experiences from early in life. Such active self-directed exploration is assumed to be a manifestation of their curiosity and to lead to greater engagement and better learning. It is therefore a crucial aspect of early development we do not yet understand. For instance, little is known about the mechanisms underlying how infants structure their own exploration, and how we can measure individual differences in their trait curiosity. This talk presents four studies making an important start to exploring these intricate dynamics. In the first study, 10-12-month-old infants could freely explore two novel categories within a new, gaze-contingent paradigm which enabled us to distinguish between exploration – switching from one category to the other – and exploitation – consecutively triggering exemplars from the same category. The second study presents a novel caregiver report questionnaire, the Infant and Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire (ITCQ), providing a reliable and valid measure to capture individual differences in trait curiosity in 5-24-month-olds. This instrument has great potential to contribute to our understanding of how variations in curiosity may impact infants' exploration and subsequently their learning outcomes and developmental trajectories. The third and fourth studies applied the novel questionnaire to explain additional variance in the recorded exploration behaviours found in study 1 as well as being predictive of infants’ language development one year later. Together, this body of work builds the foundation for new research avenues concerning the measurement of active exploration and curiosity in infancy.