Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A growing body of research suggests that infants and children are sensitive to signals of information gain. However, thevalue of a piece of information may also change as the learner knows more. How do changes that occur naturally inchildrens intuitive theories contribute to their subsequent learning? Here we tested whether children who are at differentstages of understanding an intuitive theory also differ in their interest in acquiring more information in the same domain.We tested childrens performance in three distinct domains, including intuitive biology, psychology, and beliefs about psy-chosomatic events. We found that children at earlier stages of their intuitive theories were more likely to seek informationin the related domain than children with mature knowledge. These results are the first to show the relationship betweennatural changes in childrens existing knowledge and childrens future learning preferences.