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

很多早期学习是在不同的社会环境中进行的。尽管情绪表达在幼儿与他人的社交互动中无处不在，但大多数关于早期社交学习的研究主要集中在模仿和教学上，留下了一些重要的开放问题，即儿童从他人的情绪线索中学习什么以及如何学习。目前的项目旨在了解婴儿和儿童如何利用他人的惊讶表情作为学习信号来指导他们的推理和探索。这一结果将改变科学家、照顾者和从业者思考情绪在正式和非正式教育环境中的作用的方式，并为情绪识别障碍(如自闭症)如何扰乱从他人情绪中学习提供新的见解。该项目将与科学博物馆的公众推广和本科生(URM)研究培训相结合，产生对发展科学以外的学科感兴趣的结果，包括认知科学、教育学、临床心理学和人工智能/机器学习。该项目综合先前关于儿童在社会背景中的推理和情绪理解发展的研究，测试关于情绪在早期学习中的作用的新假设，重点是惊讶作为替代预测错误的表达。针对婴儿和儿童的四项行为研究(例如，注视时间、探索)旨在支持以下目标。第一个目标是描述婴儿利用他人的惊讶来推断世界上看不见的状态，并相应地调节他们的注意力(例如，注视)的能力。第二个目标是探索幼儿和学龄前儿童将他人的惊讶和他们的知识状态整合起来积极指导自己探索的能力的发展。第三个目的是调查儿童对他人惊喜可靠性的敏感度的发展。到项目结束时，我们将拥有一个更严格的早期学习科学理论，其中包含了情绪作为信息的作用。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.