Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the relationship between exploratory learningand confidence scale judgments in understanding andimproving children’s early recognition of uncertainty. Four-and five-year-olds were presented with stimuli that varied intheir amount of occlusion. We assessed children’s ability todistinguish between these levels of uncertainty using twotypes of measures. Experiment 1 used a traditional 3-pointconfidence scale to examine explicit uncertainty judgments.Experiment 2 examined exploration preference as an implicitmeasure of uncertainty using the same stimuli. We comparedchildren’s performance on these two tasks before and aftertheir experience of disconfirming evidence, to assess theimpact of surprising events on the recognition of uncertainty.Results indicate that children intuitively recognize gaps intheir knowledge and express this in their exploratory behaviorbefore they are able to spontaneously produce accurateconfidence judgments. We also find that this implicitrecognition of uncertainty may be leveraged to support andimprove explicit judgments, even without extensive training.