Children's Novelty Preferences Depend on Information-Seeking Goals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children are often drawn to novelty, but these preferences may depend on their goals. In two experiments (N = 302), we show that children have differing preferences for novelty when seeking information compared to when they are asked to prioritize other goals. In Experiment 1, 4-7-year-olds wanted to have typical items (e.g., a four-legged chair) and learn about atypical items (e.g., a ten-legged chair). In Experiment 2, 4-6- year-olds wanted to learn about foreign characters, but liked foreign and local characters equally. We propose that children prefer to learn about novel instances for the promise of new information, which is evident in at least two domains (artifacts and people). However, this preference diminishes when children are asked about who they like, and it reverses to a familiarity preference when choosing between artifacts to acquire. In sum, our findings suggest that children’s preferences for novelty versus familiarity are sensitive to different goals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".