Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies suggest that children are \emph{ecological active learners} who recognize and exploit the ecology of their learning environment (Ruggeri, 2022). However, when assessed by verbal tasks such as the 20-questions game, systematic search only matures around age 7. The current study examined if even young children can adapt their information-search strategies in a developmentally-appropriate task requiring minimal verbal or conceptual abstraction skills. Three to 7-year-olds (N = 76, M = 5.7 years) played a search game with a structure analogous to the 20-questions game. We manipulated whether children received predecisional cues about the past location of the solution or not, across two search phases, and further varied whether the cues follow a Uniform or Skewed distribution. Children adapted their information-search strategies as predicted: They followed a constraint-seeking strategy in the absence of cues, and only switched to hypothesis-scanning when exposed to the Skewed cues.