Investigating the cognitive mechanisms underlying children's question asking

研究儿童提问背后的认知机制

• 批准号: 2204021
• 负责人: Emily Liquin
• 金额: $ 13.8万
• 依托单位: Liquin, Emily G
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Fellowship Award
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2204021&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Investigating; cognitive; mechanisms; underlying; children

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Todd Gureckis and Dr. Marjorie Rhodes at New York University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the cognitive mechanisms that enable children to ask effective questions. Question asking is a key tool for learning, especially in childhood, but coming up with an informative question—one that will elicit new and useful information—is often difficult. Studying how children ask informative questions will advance scientific understanding of how humans guide their own learning. This will have implications in educational settings, where students often fail to ask effective questions. Moreover, by understanding how humans guide their own learning, researchers will be better able to desig machines that do the same—an important problem for Artificial Intelligence.The present project will develop and test a new account of question asking, inspired by recent research on decision making and problem solving. This account delineates multiple routes a learner might take to generate candidate questions and adjudicate between them, with a tradeoff between the informativeness of the question that is ultimately asked and the computational costs (e.g., time, cognitive effort) associated with generating and selecting this question. Using a multi-method approach, this research will test (1) whether there is evidence for these multiple routes to question asking in 2- to 10-year-old children, and (2) how children navigate the tradeoff between question informativeness and computational cost. In particular, this research will analyze an existing corpus of naturalistic parent-child conversation to test how children’s questions are shaped by their parents’ previous questions and answers, and it will develop new experimental paradigms to investigate how and when children innovate novel, informative questions. The results from this research will shed new light on how parents' questions and answers, children's conceptual knowledge, and computational considerations inform children’s question asking in a range of settings. As a result, this project will take a significant step towards an understanding of the complex cognitive mechanisms that underlie question asking—a skill that exemplifies human intelligence and creativity and makes important contributions to learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该奖项是 NSF 社会、行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金 (SPRF) 计划的一部分。SPRF 计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门的科学职业培养有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。 SPRF 奖项涉及在知名科学家的赞助下进行为期两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究，旨在促进科学界各个领域的科学家的参与，包括来自代表性不足群体的科学家的参与。其研究项目和活动；博士后时期被认为是实现这一目标的重要专业发展阶段。纽约大学的马乔里·罗兹 (Marjorie Rhodes) 博士后奖学金支持一位早期职业科学家研究使儿童能够提出有效问题的认知机制，提问是学习的关键工具，尤其是在儿童时期，但提出了一个信息丰富的问题​​——一个。这将引发新的和有用的研究儿童如何提出信息性问题将促进对人类如何指导自己学习的科学理解，这将对学生经常无法提出有效问题的教育环境产生影响。通过学习，研究人员将能够更好地设计具有相同功能的机器——这是人工智能的一个重要问题。本项目将开发和测试一种新的提问方式，其灵感来自于最近关于决策和问题解决的研究。学习者可能采取多种途径来生成候选问题，并且在最终提出的问题的信息量和与生成和选择该问题相关的计算成本（例如时间、认知努力）之间进行权衡，本研究将使用多种方法来测试（1）。 ）是否有证据表明 2 至 10 岁儿童提出问题的多种途径，以及（2）儿童如何在问题信息量和计算成本之间进行权衡。特别是，本研究将分析现有的语料库。自然主义的亲子对话来测试孩子的问题如何受到父母之前的问题和答案的影响，并将开发新的实验范式来研究孩子如何以及何时提出新颖的、信息丰富的问题​​。这项研究的结果将为了解如何提出新的问题提供新的线索。父母的问题和答案、孩子的概念知识和计算考虑因素会影响孩子在各种环境中的提问。因此，该项目将在理解提问背后的复杂认知机制方面迈出重要一步——这是一项技能。体现了人类的智慧和创造力并对学习做出了重要贡献。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。