Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies find that school-age children learn better whenthey have active control during study. Yet little is knownabout how individual differences in strategy or cognitive con-trol skills may affect active learning for preschoolers, nor ifexperimental measures of active learning map onto real-worldlearning outcomes. The current study assesses 101 low-income5-year-olds on an active category learning task, and measuresof executive function, attention, and school readiness. We findthat preschoolers use an informative sampling strategy for cat-egories defined by stimuli features in 1D and when presentedwith a distractor dimension (2D). Children accurately classifyin 1D, but show mixed performance in 2D. Attention predictssampling accuracy, and working memory and inhibitory con-trol predict classification accuracy. Performance in the activelearning task predicts early math and pre-literacy skills. Thesefindings suggest that trial-by-trial learning decisions may re-veal insight into how cognitive control skills support the ac-quisition of knowledge.