Study title

The study is an eyetracking experiment run with 12- and 28-month old children and adults. Participants from each age group were randomly assigned to a label or no-label condition. Participants saw a single shape prime from a novel shape category for 10s, followed by four further target shapes from the same category, for 10 prime-target pairs (20 for adults). Participants in the no label viewed these images in silence; participants in the label condition hear a sentence spoken by a female British English speak labelling the shapes with a novel label. More details are provided in cur2d-methods.pdf. The current upload consists of eyetracking data, anonymous participant information, visual and auditory stimuli, and details of the design, participant, methods.The overall goal of this award was to understand how babies learn when allowed to explore their environment based on their own curiosity, outside the constrained experimental setting typical of most research in early cognitive development. We were also interested in how this curiosity-based exploration might be influenced by language. This goal was approached in two ways: first using computational modelling to examine the potential learning mechanisms involved in curiosity; and second, experimentally, to develop a picture of what babies and toddlers do when engaged in curiosity-driven learning. In our computational work we developed the first model of babies curiosity-driven learning inspired by the mechanisms known to exist in the human brain. This model predicted that when allowed to freely choose what to learn from and when, young children should learn best from an environment which is neither too simple nor too complex; that is, medium difficulty should best support learning, and importantly, children should be able to generate this level of difficulty themselves without adults structuring their learning environment on their behalf. This model was published in a high-impact interdisciplinary journal (Twomey &...