Goals Matter: Children's Exploration of Ambiguity is Sensitive to Contextual Value

Children are voracious explorers. While this tendency is well established by both empirical and everyday evidence, accounts differ on whether exploration is goal-directed or stimulus-driven. In the current study, children (3- to 6-year-olds, n = 72) played with a novel toy that operated according to one of two possible causal rules and were given a choice between exploring to reveal the correct rule or repeating a previously successful action. Critically, while all children were aware of the rule's ambiguity and opportunity for information gain, their choices were tailored to the potential contextual value of that information. This result suggests that children's exploratory behavior is sensitive to goals rather than purely stimulus-driven, resonating with recent proposals about active learning, and providing insight into the complex character of early exploration behavior.