Like scientists, children and adults learn by asking questions
and making interventions. How does this ability develop? We
investigate how children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults
search for information to learn which kinds of objects share a
novel causal property. In particular, we consider whether
children ask questions and select interventions that are as
informative as those of adults, and whether they recognize
when to stop searching for information to provide a solution.
We find an anticipated developmental improvement in
information search efficiency. We also present a formal
analysis that allows us to identify the basis for children’s
inefficiency. In our 20-questions-style task, children initially
ask questions and make interventions no less efficiently than
adults do, but continue to search for information past the point
at which they have narrowed their hypothesis space to a
single option. In other words, the performance change from
age seven to adulthood is due largely to a change in
implementing a “stopping rule”; when considering only the
minimum number of queries participants would have needed
to identify the correct hypothesis, age differences disappear.