Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When learners improve, the temporal change in performance carries information about progress; we know we “got the hang of it” after succeeding on a task we used to fail at. Building on prior work investigating older children's ability to track their performance over time, here we ask whether two-year-olds can reason about the temporal pattern of their performance outcomes. Children in the Improvement condition experienced 3 failures followed by 3 successes (FFFSSS) whereas children in the Stochastic condition experienced the same number of failures and successes in a seemingly random sequence (SSFFSF). When asked which toy they wanted to show their parent, children were more likely to select the Test Toy over a Control Toy when the temporal sequence of their performance suggested improvement than when it appeared to be random. By reasoning about their own performance over time, even young children can make informed choices about their future actions.