Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Asking questions is a fundamental part of learning. Previous research has touched on the types of questions we askto gather information (e.g., Ruggeri & Lombrozo, 2015), but not yet on whether there are developmental differences inquestions that go unanswered. In this study, we looked at the unanswered questions children and adults ask when presentedwith new information. We found that adults asked questions on many topics such as behavior, category membership, andsocial relevance, while children mainly asked feature-related questions. Additionally, these unanswered questions wererelated to learning outcomes after the questioning period. For instance, results revealed that the presence of feature orcategory questions predicted how narrowly or broadly children categorized novel objects. These findings indicate thatunanswered questions may have consequences for learning outcomes, and that there are likely developmental differencesin how unanswered questions affect cognition.