Young Children’s Transmission of Information following Self-discovery and Instruction

Karadag, Didar and Bazhydai, Marina and Westermann, Gert (2025) Young Children’s Transmission of Information following Self-discovery and Instruction. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology. ISSN 2813-7779 (In Press)

Abstract

The current study aimed to investigate whether young children make a distinction between two types of information -self-explored vs taught -when they transmit information to others, and whether these preferences undergo a developmental change.Two-and 5-year-old children (N = 82, 37 females, predominantly White) learned about functions of novel boxes either through self-exploration or through being taught and were then asked to share information about these boxes with a naïve learner. Two-year-old children transmitted the instructed function first more often than the self-explored function (Cohen's d = .55) whereas 5-year-olds did not show a preference. Implications of these results with respect to methodological choices, development and selectivity in teaching are discussed.