TY - JOUR
T1 - Infants rationally decide when and how to deploy effort
AU - Lucca, Kelsey
AU - Horton, Rachel
AU - Sommerville, Jessica A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2020/4/1
Y1 - 2020/4/1
N2 - The ability to decide whether, when and how to try is central to human learning. We investigated whether infants can make rational inferences about when and how to try on a novel problem-solving task. After learning from an adult that the task was either easy, difficult or impossible to solve, infants varied in whether, when and how they tried based on the type of social evidence that they received and on their own ongoing experience with the task. Specifically, infants formed expectations about the task, their own ability to solve the task and the experimenter’s ability to solve the task, in light of accumulating evidence across time that impacted their time spent trying, trying force, affect, and help-seeking behaviour on the task. Thus, infants flexibly integrate social input and first-hand experience in a dynamic fashion to engage in adaptive persistence.
AB - The ability to decide whether, when and how to try is central to human learning. We investigated whether infants can make rational inferences about when and how to try on a novel problem-solving task. After learning from an adult that the task was either easy, difficult or impossible to solve, infants varied in whether, when and how they tried based on the type of social evidence that they received and on their own ongoing experience with the task. Specifically, infants formed expectations about the task, their own ability to solve the task and the experimenter’s ability to solve the task, in light of accumulating evidence across time that impacted their time spent trying, trying force, affect, and help-seeking behaviour on the task. Thus, infants flexibly integrate social input and first-hand experience in a dynamic fashion to engage in adaptive persistence.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85078222979&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1038/s41562-019-0814-0
DO - 10.1038/s41562-019-0814-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 31959925
AN - SCOPUS:85078222979
SN - 2397-3374
VL - 4
SP - 372
EP - 379
JO - Nature Human Behaviour
JF - Nature Human Behaviour
IS - 4
ER -