Influence of Knowledge Distribution on Children’s Information Seeking Strategies

Abstract

Early in development, children rely on others to obtain information about unfamiliar situations or objects. They can exploit sources of information, by asking a familiar informant, or explore new sources by asking an unfamiliar informant. Children’s choices are guided by their previous experience with each informant. Children as young as 4-years-old have been shown to track informant accuracy and direct future questions to the more accurate informant (Fitneva & Dunfield, 2010; Koenig & Harris, 2005). Moreover, the distribution of knowledge may also have an impact on children’s information seeking strategies. In the current study, children were presented with an informant who correctly answered some questions. For the final question of a category, they were asked to make a choice between the familiar and unfamiliar informant. The key manipulation of this study was the knowledge distribution, as children were explicitly told either one informant or all the informants know the names of the objects in question. We expect that, in the narrowly- distributed knowledge condition, children will be more likely to exploit. On the contrary, we expect that they will be more likely to explore in the broadly-distributed knowledge condition.