Azzurra Ruggeri

From early in development, children actively seek information by asking questions, but the criteria by which they evaluate and select questions remain debated. Expected information gain (\EIG), a normative measure of question informativeness, has been proposed to guide children's information search from the first years of life. However, because previous studies using the 20-Questions paradigm have treated informativeness categorically, it remains unclear whether children are sensitive to graded differences in informativeness, or how they weigh \EIG against other desirable properties of questions. Across four experiments ($N_{\text{children}} = 424$, $N_{\text{adults}} = 78$), we examined how school-age children and adults evaluated and selected questions that varied in \EIG and in the probability of receiving a confirmatory answer (\Pyes), a quantity which was confounded with \EIG in most previous work. In Experiments 1-3, both children and adults consistently favored questions with a higher \Pyes, even when these questions were less informative. Ratings and choices showed little evidence of sensitivity to graded differences in \EIG, and performance on trials where \EIG conflicted with \Pyes indicated choices relied on the latter.Even after addressing design limitations in Experiment 4, only adults chose the maximally informative question when \EIG and \Pyes dissociated. The findings suggest that children's reliance on informativeness is more context-dependent and developmentally protracted than previously assumed.

Research has established that children are “naive psychologists,” adept at understanding and navigating the social world from an early age. However, most of this work has focused on how children process information that they acquire incidentally, for example, by passively observing others’ actions. Here, we draw on literature framing children as intuitive scientists who actively seek information and test hypotheses to propose a view of children as naive experimental psychologists. From this perspective, children play an active role in selecting and pursuing relevant social information (e.g., about agents’ goals, traits, or relationships), whereby their search strategies are influenced both by context and task demands, as well as their prior beliefs, concepts, and domain-specific naive theories. We argue that the particular challenges associated with learning and reasoning about other minds may necessitate that children leverage their active learning competences, and we outline how the social domain uniquely constrains and shapes the learning process. We review existing research on social-information seeking in children and adults and identify directions for future research, emphasizing that children’s developing social cognition should be understood in terms of the active, exploratory role they take in learning about and participating in the social world.

This paper uses a Yoked experimental design to investigate the selective advantage of active spatial navigation in 4- to 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with a map game in which they were asked to find the shortest way for a monster to get across town while collecting its five monster friends on the way. Active control was associated with better recall for path length and the area between paths, whereas no differences were observed for the number of corners. Further, active navigation did not enhance episodic memory. Our results indicate that the benefits of active control during navigation are selective, supporting the encoding of global route characteristics, while leaving other detailed or incidental aspects unaffected.

How do children's exploration strategies develop? Prior work has shown that children explore more broadly than adults, often driven by uncertainty. Yet, little is known about how more sophisticated strategies, such as empowerment - i.e. seeking actions that expand future possibilities - unfold across development. We investigated this in two experiments using a complex combinatorial game ("Tiny Alchemy''). In Experiment 1, we found that empowerment use increased with age, while uncertainty decreased. Young children (5 - 8 years) primarily relied on uncertainty, while older children (9 - 13 years) and adults used both uncertainty and empowerment. In Experiment 2, we asked whether younger children's limited use of empowerment reflected different semantic intuitions. Results showed that older children used empowerment but could not explicitly judge it, while adults both used and accurately assessed empowerment. These findings suggest that empowerment emerges gradually: first as an implicit strategy in late childhood, and only later becoming explicit and verbalizable.

Risk preferences are shaped by outcome anticipation and feedback integration. Understanding how these processes evolve across the human lifespan is essential for theoretical models of decision-making, for applications in education, and behavioral public policy aimed at protecting against age-related vulnerabilities. This study examines the lifespan development (N = 658; ages 8 to 78) of decision-making under risk through the lens of these two constitutive components, using a behavioral paradigm merging descriptive and experiential information. Our findings replicate the established pattern of a peak of risk-taking during adolescence, followed by a steady decline with aging. Moreover, our results show that while the influence of outcome anticipation matures gradually during childhood and adolescence, the propensity to learn from feedback diminishes progressively with age. These results suggest that while adults may rely on more sophisticated internal models of probability, these models may paradoxically support faulty reasoning, potentially contributing to suboptimal choices.

Combining memories of related experiences is fundamental to the formation of generalizable knowledge. Past work has shown that the ability to integrate and reason about related events improves across childhood. However, little work has examined developmental changes in the ability to actively construct new relational knowledge by making decisions about how to study related materials. We used a transitive inference (TI) task to examine the active construction of relational knowledge in 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 107). We find that age-related improvements in relational inference are accompanied by an increasing preference for "chained" study, such that overlapping relations are studied in consecutive trials. Using computational models of transitive inference, we show that these developmental changes are consistent with a growing tendency to link individual relations together into a single mental structure while learning. This process is facilitated when children study premises in chained sequences. These findings suggest that exploratory study behaviors that promote relational reasoning emerge late in childhood, developing alongside the capacity to maintain and manipulate more complex mental representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Children encounter collective decisions—which game to play, which path the group takes, whose preference wins—long before the emergence of a robust political cognition. In many of these contexts, majority rule serves as a default solution. We investigate the conditions under which children aged of 5 and 13 are willing to compromise majority rule and their own enfranchisement for material gain, by having them vote to entrust one of two leaders with decision-making authority for the group: one who commits to following the majority's preference, and one who decides unilaterally. Across three experiments, we manipulate the material incentives offered by each leader, the number of rounds for which the winning leader will make decisions, and the narratives leaders use to justify their decision-making behavior. We find that children prefer leaders who follow majority rule, but that their preference shifts toward the unilateral decision-maker when it benefits them materially—though a minority of children do remain with the majoritarian. The preference for the unilateral decision-maker who provides a material incentive is further mitigated when the preference extends across multiple rounds, supporting the notion that majority rule can function as a hedge against uncertainty. Children are also sensitive to narratives that frame unilateral decision-making as protection of a vulnerable minority, though moral justification alone shifts fewer children than material incentives. Together, these findings suggest that children's endorsement of majority rule is a robust but context-sensitive default, modulated by personal incentives, long-term uncertainty, and justificatory narratives.

The sources we rely on are embedded in networks of affiliation and competition, and engaging with them carries epistemic and social costs, yet little is known about how children navigate these demands when they conflict. Across two experiments, 543 children aged 5-15 played a tablet-based quest game in which they joined a team, learned whether their team was winning or losing, and were exposed to contrasting leader traits—competence in Experiment 1, prosociality in Experiment 2. They then made four decisions: which leader to gather information from, whether to ask the other leader as well, utilize the information they gathered, and pick which leader they’d play with in a future game. Children displayed a consistent baseline preference for their own team leader across all dependent variables, but this preference was modulated differently depending on the available trait: when competence was explicit, children disambiguated leader quality from team performance and Team Status had no effect; when only prosociality was available, children used team performance as a proxy for competence, with both factors independently shaping their decisions. A hierarchical Bayesian model pooling both experiments confirmed that older children were more loyal in their choice of information source and future leader preference, yet more likely to deviate when acting on the information they gathered—and when they did, increasingly resolved the conflict by choosing a neutral third option rather than endorsing the opposing leader—suggesting that over development, children do not simply become less biased but more strategic in managing competing epistemic and social goals.