Young children’s capacity to seek information in preparation for a future event

Abstract

Despite the wealth of research examining children’s future-oriented cognition, little is known about the development of spontaneous information seeking behavior aimed at achieving future goals. Here we present a first experiment directly investigating the emergence of such behavior in 4- to 7-year-old children. We presented children with two sets of cards: one with target information that they were told they would be tested on in the future, and a second set with distractor information that they were told had no future purpose. Without being provided instructions on which information to memorize, children were then given time to study the cards in preparation for the future event. The 6- and 7-year-olds, but not the 4- and 5-year-olds, spent significantly more time attending to target cards than distractor cards. While only a minority of children used overt learning strategies (e.g., verbal rehearsal, self-testing), the number of children who did so increased with age.