Infants Generate Structured Learning Environments During Curiosity-Driven Category Exploration

Whilst decades of carefully-controlled developmental research have told us much about the myriad variables that affect infants’ early cognitive development, the relationship between infants’ real-world, self-directed exploration and their learning is poorly understood, despite this curiosity-driven learning constituting the vast majority of early experience. Recent computational work (Twomey & Westermann, 2018) predicted that when engaged in curiosity-driven exploration, infants should impose structure on their learning environment, with this systematicity unfolding dynamically as infants move from stimulus to stimulus, generating an intermediate level of task complexity. The current study tests this prediction in a free exploration task. Twelve-, 18- and 24-month-old children (N = 53) were allowed to freely play with three novel object categories, across six trials (two per category). Critically, to allow us to quantify complexity, category exemplars were drawn from continua in which neighbouring objects varied systematically. Infants were first presented with a prime object drawn from one extreme of the continuum, followed by the remaining four objects. Analyses of infants’ first touches following removal of the prime demonstrated a systematic preference for the perceptually most distant object, irrespective of prime. Cluster analysis of touch sequences further suggested that infants generated systematic exploratory sequences when engaged in curiosity-driven object exploration. Specifically, the unfolding of these exploratory sequences in time indicates that infants prefer intermediate complexity. Overall, convergent with the computational work, this work demonstrates for the first time that when engaged in free exploration of the physical environment, infants are neither passive learners nor random explorers; rather, they are capable of directing their own timetable for learning by imposing structure on their environment.