Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Childrens exploration is driven by opportunities for learning, and past research has suggested rational explanations for howearly home experiences may affect childrens active learning (Yu et al., 2020) or willingness to wait for rewards (Kidd etal., 2013). However, less work has characterized the relationship between childrens environmental contexts and play. Wepooled exploratory play data from past experiments in our lab (M(age)=56mos; N=278), and correlated play behavior withmedian income and education in the childs home zipcode. Children from lower SES areas played significantly longer,more variably, and spent a lower proportion of time focusing on demonstrated functions which traded off with lengthand variability of play exclusively for children from lower educated areas. Importantly, home income is confounded withdaycare income; future work will disentangle distinct influences of family SES and daycare environment. This work layscritical groundwork for understanding early active learning across developmental contexts.