7/28/2023 0 Comments Kids are queriousThere was also little change in the least interested babies over the six-month period.īut was this difference among babies predictive of future thinking? To determine that, the team originally wanted to bring the participants back to the lab after they turned three, but because of the pandemic, they instead sent their parents standardized curiosity questionnaires. "Babies are affected by these magical events in different ways, and these ways appear to be stable across a six-month period during infancy." "We found babies who looked really long at magical objects at 11 months were the same babies that looked really long at magical objects at 17 months," Perez said. Six months later, the babies, now a year and a half old, now saw either a new toy that behaved normally, or seemed to float in mid-air. At 11 months old, some babies were shown a toy that behaved normally, while others saw the toy seemingly pass straight through a wall. To find out, they launched an experiment where they studied 65 babies over time. "We started to wonder if maybe all of that individual variability is actually meaningful, and tells us that babies are responding to the world differently, from baby to baby," Perez said. But Feigenson and Perez suspected something important was happening. Researchers assumed the variability was due to babies being babies-maybe they were fussy or hungry or distracted. Image credit: Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University Other babies will take a glimpse, yawn, and they're done. Some will stare and stare at a car that seems to float in midair or a ball that seems to pass through a solid wall. Many but not all babies tend to look longer at the unexpected events. In those experiments, babies are shown regular objects and objects behaving in surprising, unexpected ways. The key question behind this work was sparked by Feigenson's own curiosity, and that of lead author Johns Hopkins graduate student Jasmin Perez, about a constant frustration with the classic experimental method for studying infant cognition. Until this study, little was known about curiosity in the pre-verbal mind, as curiosity has mainly been studied in much older children and adults. The findings appear today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "What the data suggest is that some three-year-olds have a leg up or seem particularly well positioned to learn a lot about the world." "Something about a baby's curiosity about magic tricks is predicting how curious they become as preschoolers," said Lisa Feigenson, co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. “In recent years, researchers have demonstrated that curiosity-long thought to help motivate learning-is also associated with better learning outcomes.” In a 2009 Psychological Science article, researchers found that people were more likely to recall the answers to questions they were especially curious about.Name Jill Rosen Email Office phone 44 Cell phone 44 Twitter JHUMediaTeamĪ first-of-its-kind longitudinal study of infant curiosity found that months-old babies most captivated by magic tricks became the most curious toddlers, suggesting a pre-verbal baby's level of interest in surprising aspects of the world remains constant over time and could predict their future cognitive ability. Put simply, a child’s curiosity about a subject correlates with whether they’ll retain what they learn. Most interestingly, kids remember lessons the most when they were stumped in the first place. Curiosity and learning are, therefore, less about finding answers than it is about the process of seeking understanding.Įducators who slow down and provide students time to wonder and be curious about an idea before expecting them to provide a rote answer are adept at fostering curiosity in the classroom. “Curiosity does not hold up well under intense expectation,” explains Eric Shonstrom in Education Week. Our role is to give time and free rein to inherent curiosity and questions, and let our students exist in the heightened state of hungering for knowledge.”Ĭuriosity Counteracts Boredom & Grows Self-Sufficiency Seasoned teachers and researchers agree that “our role as teachers is not to provide answers. The old saying “curiosity killed the cat” isn’t too far off the mark, when you consider most of the trouble that kids get into starts with boredom. Naturally curious children can go “un-entertained,” a.k.a.
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