“Wow, I did it!”: Unexpected success increases preschoolers’ exploratory play on a later task
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exploratory play supports children’s learning, but the factors that influence play are not fully identified. Here, we investigate whether experiencing an unexpected success on an initial task influences children’s exploration on a subsequent task. In Experiment 1 (N=72), we found that when 4-year-olds successfully completed a puzzle that they were told is hard (compared to when they were told that the puzzle is easy or at baseline when no difficulty information was provided), they spent more time exploring and attempted more different interventions with a subsequent novel toy. This suggests that an unexpected success influences children’s subsequent exploration. In Experiment 2 (N=48) we examined two alternative interpretations of the Experiment 1 findings: that children carried over difficulty assumptions from task 1 to the new toy or that children had unused attentional resources. Children completed the puzzle and then were told that the novel toy itself was either easy or hard. Children did not explore longer or more variably across these conditions, providing evidence against these alternative accounts. Our findings point to an important role for past playful experiences: unexpected success on one task motivates children to explore longer and with more breadth on another task.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".