Ecological learning: How children adapt their active learning strategies to achieve efficiency

How do young children learn so much about the world, and so efficiently? This talk presents the recent studies investigating theoretically and empirically how children actively seek information in their physical and social environments as evidence to test and dynamically revise their hypotheses and theories over time. In particular, it will focus on how children adapt their active learning strategies. such as question-asking and explorative behavior, in response to the task characteristics, to the statistical structure of the hypothesis space, and to the feedback received. Such adaptiveness and flexibility is crucial to achieve efficiency in situations of uncertainty, when testing alternative hypotheses, making decisions, drawing causal inferences and solving categorization tasks.