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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 30, 2026

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task

Published on: June 1, 2015

Children teach methods they could not discover for themselves.

Samuel Ronfard¹, Alexandra M Was², Paul L Harris¹

¹Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

|November 6, 2015

Summary

Children transmit taught information when it is difficult to discover independently. Self-discovered knowledge influences knowledge transmission, especially when taught methods are opaque compared to own discoveries.

Keywords:

Cumulative culture Preschoolers Prior experience Social cognition Teaching Transmission biases

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Published on: April 19, 2017

Area of Science:

Cognitive Development
Learning Sciences
Child Psychology

Background:

Children often learn through instruction and exploration.
Understanding how these two learning methods interact is crucial for effective pedagogy.
Prior research has not fully elucidated the conditions under which self-discovered knowledge influences the transmission of instructed knowledge.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the impact of children's self-discovered knowledge on their transmission of taught information.
To determine the circumstances under which children are more or less likely to transmit instructed knowledge after exploration.
To examine the role of method transparency in the interplay between self-discovery and instructed learning.

Main Methods:

Three studies involving 100 children were conducted.
Participants were taught a method for extracting rewards from a box.
A subset of participants explored the box to discover their own method before instruction, with varying transparency of taught vs. discovered methods.

Main Results:

Children who did not explore always transmitted the taught method.
Children who explored and received instruction transmitted taught information, particularly when it was more opaque than their discovered method.
Self-discovered knowledge selectively influences the fidelity of transmitting instructed information.

Conclusions:

Children transmit taught information faithfully when it is difficult to discover independently.
The transparency of taught information relative to self-discovered knowledge moderates knowledge transmission in children.
Findings highlight the importance of considering the learner's exploratory experiences when evaluating the transmission of instructed knowledge.