Infants’ curiosity is linked to cognitive capacity in early childhood

Research has shown that infants are curious and actively seek situations from which they canlearn. For instance, a recent eye-tracking study demonstrates that babies tend to allocate theirattention to stimuli that offer opportunities for learning new information. Interestingly, however,the degree to which attention is guided by information gain varies among individual infants.This longitudinal study provides the first empirical evidence suggesting that these earlyindividual differences in infants’ curiosity are linked to later cognitive development. We foundthat the extent to which infants’ attention was guided by information gain at 8 months wasrelated to their IQ scores at 3½ years of age (n=60, 50% female). These findings are the first tosuggest the lasting consequences of early existing differences in curiosity-driven explorationfor later childhood cognitive development.