Preschool-Aged Children Jointly Consider Others' Emotional Expressions and Prior Knowledge to Decide When to Explore

Emotional expressions are abundant in children's lives. What role do they play in children's causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others' emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0-4.9; N = 112, the United States) learned about one salient causal function of a novel toy and then saw an adult play with it. Children explored the toy more when the adult expressed surprise than when she expressed happiness (Experiment 1), but only when the adult already knew about the toy's salient function (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children consider others' knowledge and selectively interpret others' surprise as vicarious prediction error to guide their own exploration.

Automated summary

The study found that preschool-aged children use others' emotional expressions, such as surprise, to infer unknown causal functions and guide their exploration of novel toys. Children explored the toys more when adults expressed surprise compared to happiness, suggesting that children consider others' knowledge and interpret surprise as vicarious prediction error to guide their own exploration.