Fanxiao Wani Qiu

Lew-Levy and Amir contend that children are cultural producers in their own right, contributing to cumulative culture through peer culture. We argue that children’s pedagogical contributions extend beyond the social world of peers. Children not only transmit child-relevant knowledge from peer to peer, but also actively share, with children and adults alike, knowledge both that ultimately stemmed from cognitively mature agents.

This research investigated 4- to 8-year-old children's learning preferences based on teachers’ responses to peers’ pragmatic (Study 1, 2021–2024, N = 100, Mage = 6.56 years, SDage = 1.41, 50 females, 61% White) and naturalistic (Study 2, 2024, N = 101, Mage = 6.24 years, SDage = 1.50, 57 females, 55% White) questions. Children evaluated teachers providing (i) explanations with semantic content vs. nonexplanations and (ii) nonexplanation Socratic vs. authoritarian responses. Across both studies, children preferred learning from teachers who offered explanations. In Study 2, with age, children distinguished between nonexplanations, favoring teachers who provided Socratic over authoritarian responses. Overall, children increasingly distinguish between different nonexplanations based on question domain to make inferences about a teacher's future credibility.

We examined an understudied aspect of children's pedagogical cognition and investigated whether children selectively transmit objective information. In three experiments (N = 168), 5- and 6-year-olds were asked to distinguish between objective and subjective statements (Experiment 1) and to choose objective or subjective information to pass on to others (Experiments 2 and 3). Children of both ages distinguished between the two types of statements, OR = 19.1, and preferentially transmitted more objective than subjective information when asked to teach, OR = 5.06. A control condition, in which participants were asked to share information with a peer, found that 5- and 6-year-olds also favored sharing objective information in a nonpedagogical context, OR = 1.96. Critically, children taught more objective information when placed in a pedagogical stance compared to a conversational context, OR = 2.31. These findings contribute to the growing body of work suggesting that children recognize teaching as a unique communicative mechanism, one that calls for the propagation of objective information, not subjective opinion. Our study furthers the understanding of how young children's pedagogical knowledge and competence develop. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Teaching requires distilling a rich category distribution into a small set of informative exemplars. Although prior work shows that humans consider both representativeness and diversity when teaching, the computational principles underlying these tradeoffs remain unclear. We address this gap by modeling human exemplar selection using neural network feature representations and principled subset selection criteria. Novel visual categories were embedded along a one-dimensional morph continuum using pretrained vision models, and selection strategies varied in their emphasis on prototypicality, joint representativeness, and diversity. Adult participants selected one to three exemplars to teach a learner. Model-human comparisons revealed that strategies based on joint representativeness, or its combination with diversity, best captured human judgments, whereas purely prototypical or diversity-based strategies performed worse. Moreover, transformer-based representations consistently aligned more closely with human behavior than convolutional networks. These results highlight the potential utility of dataset distillation methods in machine learning as computational models for teaching.

Understanding how humans and machines learn from sparse data is central to cognitive science and machine learning. Using a species-fair design, we compare children and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in a few-shot semi-supervised category learning task. Both learners are exposed to novel object categories under identical conditions. Learners receive mixtures of labeled and unlabeled exemplars while we vary supervision (1/3/6 labels), target feature (size, shape, pattern), and perceptual alignment (high/low). We find that children generalize rapidly from minimal labels but show strong feature-specific biases and sensitivity to alignment. CNNs show a different interaction profile: added supervision improves performance, but both alignment and feature structure moderate the impact additional supervision has on learning. These results show that human-model comparisons must be drawn under the right conditions, emphasizing interactions among supervision, feature structure, and alignment rather than overall accuracy.

Empirical studies on selective teaching and informing indicate that children may vary what they teach depending on whom they are teaching, taking into account how helpful the information is for a given audience. The current meta‐analysis quantifies the effect of selective informing and teaching in 2–7‐year‐olds by examining the relationship between the helpfulness of the information and the frequency of information transmission. Through a systematic search that yielded 1483 results, 28 studies (104 effect sizes, N = 2716) met the inclusion criteria. Using robust variance estimation, we found a medium average effect, Hedges’ g = 0.578, 95% CI (0.331, 0.825), suggesting that children selectively share information based on its perceived helpfulness to the listener. Moderator analyses revealed that age and communicative context were significant factors. Children were more informative in their communication when asked to teach compared to other, nonpedagogical prompts. This finding supports and extends natural pedagogy theory—young children not only interpret pedagogical information differently than information acquired through other means, but they are more selective in their informing when teaching. Additionally, we observed a key developmental progression at age 4. Four‐ to 7‐year‐olds, but not 2–3‐year‐olds, selectively shared information that was most helpful for a given learner. This coincides with the development of false‐belief understanding, which undergoes significant development at around age 4. Taken together, the present synthesis suggests that young children actively engage in selective social learning from both sides, that of beneficiaries and benefactors of valuable information.

What kind of information is appropriate to teach depends on learner characteristics. In three experiments, 5- to 7-year-old children (N = 170, 50% female, 68% White; data collection: 2022–2023) chose between basic and complex information to teach an infant or adult audience. The older, but not younger, children, taught more complex information to adults and more basic information to infants, (OR = 2.03). Both ages overcame their own preference for complex information when teaching infants (h = .45). Children's reflections on why they made particular pedagogical choices did not predict audience-contingent teaching. The findings suggest that young children can infer what kind of information is suitable given a learner's maturity, with a key developmental progression between ages 5 and 7.