Abstract
We investigated 4th-grade children’s search strategies on sequential search tasks in which the goal is to identify an unknown target object by asking yes–no questions about its features. We used exhaustive search to identify the most efficient question strategies and evaluated the usefulness of children’s questions accordingly. Results show that children have good intuitions regarding questions’ usefulness and search adaptively, relative to the statistical structure of the task environment. Search was especially efficient in a task environment that was representative of real-world experiences. This suggests that children may use their knowledge of real-world environmental statistics to guide their search behavior. We also compared different related search tasks. We found positive transfer effects from first doing a number search task on a later person search task.
Highlights
Often inferences and decisions must be made before all relevant information can be obtained
Because exhaustive search showed that stepwise information gain identifies the optimal question strategies in these environments, we use information gain to quantify questions’ usefulness
Perfect use of the split-half heuristic leads to scaled information gain of 1 on every question
Summary
Often inferences and decisions must be made before all relevant information can be obtained. In these situations, careful selection of questions to ask (or queries to make or experiments to conduct) is very important. Examples include a child asking a question to learn the meaning of a novel word, a scientist choosing an experiment to differentiate between competing hypotheses, or a person’s visual system directing the eyes’ gaze to informative parts of a visual scene. How do children and adults search for information? Many studies investigating information search have used. Tel.: +49 030 82406 658 (J.D. Nelson), +49 030
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