Exploration supports toddlers' persistence during problem-solving

Toddlers must rapidly acquire new skills. However, these attempts frequently come with experiences of failure which can be frustrating and lead to disengagement. Given that young children are naturally inclined to enact novel exploratory strategies in response to failure, independent exploration may sustain toddlers' persistence by shaping their perceptions of task success and offering them opportunities to experience a sense of agency. Here, these relations are examined using both archival data from the United States (n = 71, 18-month-olds; 26 female, 45 male; 72% white, originally tested in 2018) and an experimental intervention in Canada (n = 60, 18-24-month-olds; 30 female, 30 male; 25% white, tested in 2024 and 2025). The number of unique strategies that toddlers generated related to their overall persistence (ηp2 = .57). Further, experimentally encouraging exploration caused toddlers to persist longer (ηp2 = .24), and this effect was mediated by the number of unique strategies toddlers enacted (ab = 13.33, 95% CI [9.84, 16.72]). These findings provide converging correlational and causal evidence that exploration supports persistence during problem-solving, suggesting that encouraging exploration may be an effective intervention to foster persistence in early childhood.