Navigating Knowledge: Effects of State Curiosity on Children's Word Learning and Information Seeking

Early learning takes place within complex, multimodal environments where curiosity plays a critical role in guiding exploratory behaviors and supporting cognitive development. While trait curiosity shapes children's early learning experiences, state curiosity is context-dependent fostering early learning, in-part, through information seeking behaviors. Here, we explore whether state-induced curiosity can influence exploratory behaviors and facilitate word-learning within a multimodal search task that mirrors real-world learning environments. Children (2.5- to 4-year-olds) will be introduced to novel objects and labels via a storybook. After exposure to each novel object, participants will locate the target object (i.e., a sticker depicting the novel object), hidden within one of ten boxes uniformly distributed across a real-world space. Unbeknownst to participants, the target will only be hidden within a single hemispace. In the "High-Curiosity" condition, the storybook should elicit greater curiosity, whereas the "Low-Curiosity" condition will present novel words in a context that should invoke lower levels of curiosity. Following the search task, participants will complete a forced-choice word learning task. Findings will provide insights into whether and how curiosity facilitates word learning in rich, multimodal contexts and how this relationship can be impacted by children's explorative strategies, including their sensitivity to environmental statistics. SUMMARY: Curiosity drives early development, but the extent to which it facilitates learning within a multimodal environment remains underexplored. The study examines how high versus low induced curiosity states influence toddlers' exploratory behavior, including search efficiency and adaptation to spatial probability cues. The study assesses whether higher state-induced curiosity leads to stronger retention and recognition of novel word-object mappings compared to the lower curiosity condition. The study examines how curiosity-driven search strategies relate to novel word learning and whether learning is moderated by how children choose to search for information.