Investigating the cognitive mechanisms underlying children's question asking

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This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Todd Gureckis and Dr. Marjorie Rhodes at New York University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the cognitive mechanisms that enable children to ask effective questions. Question asking is a key tool for learning, especially in childhood, but coming up with an informative question—one that will elicit new and useful information—is often difficult. Studying how children ask informative questions will advance scientific understanding of how humans guide their own learning. This will have implications in educational settings, where students often fail to ask effective questions. Moreover, by understanding how humans guide their own learning, researchers will be better able to desig machines that do the same—an important problem for Artificial Intelligence.The present project will develop and test a new account of question asking, inspired by recent research on decision making and problem solving. This account delineates multiple routes a learner might take to generate candidate questions and adjudicate between them, with a tradeoff between the informativeness of the question that is ultimately asked and the computational costs (e.g., time, cognitive effort) associated with generating and selecting this question. Using a multi-method approach, this research will test (1) whether there is evidence for these multiple routes to question asking in 2- to 10-year-old children, and (2) how children navigate the tradeoff between question informativeness and computational cost. In particular, this research will analyze an existing corpus of naturalistic parent-child conversation to test how children’s questions are shaped by their parents’ previous questions and answers, and it will develop new experimental paradigms to investigate how and when children innovate novel, informative questions. The results from this research will shed new light on how parents' questions and answers, children's conceptual knowledge, and computational considerations inform children’s question asking in a range of settings. As a result, this project will take a significant step towards an understanding of the complex cognitive mechanisms that underlie question asking—a skill that exemplifies human intelligence and creativity and makes important contributions to learning.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.