Emotion as information: Young childrens use of others emotional expressions to guide their inference and exploration

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Much of early learning occurs in diverse social contexts. Despite the ubiquity of emotional expressions in young children’s social interactions with others, most research on early social learning has focused primarily on imitation and pedagogy, leaving important open questions about what and how children learn from others’ emotional cues. The current project aims to understand how infants and children harness others’ expressions of surprise as learning signals to guide their inferences and exploration. The results will transform the ways in which scientists, caregivers, and practitioners think about the role of emotion in formal and informal educational contexts, and provide new insights into how impairments in emotion recognition (e.g., ASD) may disrupt learning from others’ emotions. This project will be integrated with public outreach at science museums and undergraduate (URM) research training, generating findings that are of interest to disciplines beyond developmental science, including cognitive science, education, clinical psychology, and AI/machine learning.Synthesizing prior research on children's inferences in social contexts and development of emotion understanding, this project tests novel hypotheses on the role of emotion in early learning, focusing on the expression of surprise as vicarious prediction error. Four behavioral studies with infants and children (e.g., looking-time, exploration) are designed to support the following aims. The first aim is to characterize infants’ abilities to harness others' surprise to infer unobservable states of the world and modulate their attention (e.g., looking) accordingly. The second aim is to explore the development of toddlers’ and preschoolers’ abilities to integrate others' surprise and their knowledge states to actively guide their own exploration. The third aim is to investigate the development of children’s sensitivity to the reliability of others' surprise. By the end of the project, we will have a more rigorous scientific theory of early learning that incorporates the role of emotion as information.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.