Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children learn better through shared social experiences. Particularly, storytelling is a successful learning strategy that facilitates learning. These shared experiences are reflected in neural synchrony, which underlies predict understanding of the learned information. For adults, the scaffolding strategy, a shared social experience that involves active engagement rather than passive listening, has been shown to promote learning and has been linked with higher neural synchrony compared to passive learning. However, in the context of storytelling, it is unclear whether children will perform higher levels of neural synchrony as well as improved performances when they scaffold the learned information (tell a story about it) compared to when they passively listen. Here, we compare learning outcomes and neural basis of two learning strategies in young school-aged children in the context of storytelling.