Collaborative Research: Parental Guidance and Supervised Learning

从童年早期到成年早期，每个人都在父母、看护人、老师、顾问和其他专家的监督下。通常情况下，导师可以影响，至少在某种程度上，年轻人的学习活动。在学习环境中出现了一种基本的权衡，例如，主管可能希望防止学习者犯代价高昂的错误，但这样做会阻碍学习过程。本研究项目开发了一系列监督学习的正式理论模型，并分析了它们的预测。在这些模型中，儿童发展文献中确定的成功成人监督的关键特征可以理解为父母优化行为的结果。同样，该分析可以揭示在不同人类社会以及不同动物物种中广泛记录的育儿实践的差异。理解成人作为支持儿童学习活动的专家的作用是发展心理学的一个长期目标，也是大量实验和实证文献的焦点。本项目采用的理论方法是对儿童发展文献中采用的主要实验和经验方法的补充。

From early childhood throughout early adulthood, individuals are under the supervision of parents, caregivers, teachers, advisors, and other experts. Typically, supervisors can influence, at least to some extent, the learning activities of young people. A basic trade-off emerges in the learning environments, such that a supervisor may wish to prevent the learner from making costly mistakes, but in doing so hinder the learning process. This research project develops a family of formal theoretical models of supervised learning, and analyzes their predictions. Within these models, key features of successful adult supervision identified in the child development literature may be understood as the result of the parent's optimizing behavior. Similarly, the analysis can shed light on the widely documented variability in parenting practices across different human societies, as well as across animal species.Understanding the role of adults as experts supporting children's learning activities is a long-standing objective in developmental psychology, and the focus of a sizable experimental and empirical literature. The theoretical approach pursued in this project complements the mainly experimental and empirical approaches adopted in the child development literature.