Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do individuals select which of multiple sources of information to attend to, and which events and entities in their environment to solicit more information about? This study aims at understanding whether adults actively solicit information that they are missing to fill gaps in their knowledge of recently learned novel word-object associations. In other words, we ask whether adults actively solicit the labels of objects they are not confident about. Furthermore, given the role of confidence on the influence of feedback on word learning, we ask whether the beneficial effects of feedback on errors vary as a result of the confidence learners have in their knowledge of newly learned novel word-object associations. We will also compare the findings of this study to the results of a study with the same design that was conducted with preschoolers.