ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Dev. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Development
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdpys.2025.1553491
This article is part of the Research TopicChildren's TeachingView all 4 articles
Young Children's Transmission of Information following Self-discovery and Instruction
Provisionally accepted
- Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
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The current study aimed to investigate whether young children make a distinction between two types of information -self-explored vs taught -when they transmit information to others, and whether these preferences undergo a developmental change.Two-and 5-year-old children (N = 82, 37 females, predominantly White) learned about functions of novel boxes either through self-exploration or through being taught and were then asked to share information about these boxes with a naïve learner. Two-year-old children transmitted the instructed function first more often than the self-explored function (Cohen's d = .55) whereas 5-year-olds did not show a preference. Implications of these results with respect to methodological choices, development and selectivity in teaching are discussed.
Keywords: information transmission, Preferential transmission, instruction, exploration, developmental change, teaching Right: 0.63 cm
Received: 30 Dec 2024; Accepted: 19 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Karadag, Bazhydai and Westermann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Didar Karadag, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
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