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Naturalistic Observations

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If you want to understand how behavior occurs, one of the best ways to gain information is to simply observe the behavior in its natural context. However, people might change their behavior in unexpected ways if they know they are being observed. How do researchers obtain accurate information when people tend to hide their natural behavior? As an example, imagine that your professor asks everyone in your class to raise their hand if they always wash their hands after using the restroom. Chances...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 14, 2026

The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children's Strategic Lie-telling

The Modified Temptation Resistance Task: A Paradigm to Elicit Children's Strategic Lie-telling

Published on: April 6, 2018

Young Children's Help-Seeking as Active Information Gathering.

Christopher Vredenburgh¹, Tamar Kushnir¹

¹Department of Human Development, Cornell University.

Cognitive Science

|April 29, 2015

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Preschoolers use help-seeking strategically to learn. Children seek more assistance on difficult tasks and when they have lower initial competency, adjusting their requests to optimize learning opportunities.

Keywords:

Active learning Help-seeking Information gathering Preschoolers Scaffolding Social learning

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Development
Social Learning Theory

Background:

Social learning is crucial for young children's development.
Help-seeking in children is often viewed as a social information-gathering strategy.
Understanding how children utilize help-seeking can illuminate their learning processes.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate preschoolers' help-seeking behavior as a means of social information gathering.
To determine if children's help-seeking is influenced by their initial competency and task difficulty.
To examine how the level of assistance sought relates to competency and task difficulty.

Main Methods:

Preschoolers (mean age 52.44 months) participated in a toy assembly task.
Children's competency in assembling toys and the difficulty of each task step were assessed.
Help-seeking behaviors and the magnitude of assistance requested were recorded.

Main Results:

Children's help-seeking increased on more difficult task steps.
Less competent children sought assistance more frequently than more competent children.
The magnitude of help-seeking requests correlated with both child competency and task difficulty.

Conclusions:

Preschoolers' help-seeking is a flexible, adaptive learning strategy.
Children strategically adjust the amount and type of help they seek based on task demands and their own abilities.
Help-seeking effectively supports children's learning and information acquisition.