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Implicit mentalising involves the automatic awareness others' perspectives. The Joint Simon task demonstrates this as a Joint Simon Effect (JSE): A spatial compatibility effect is elicited more strongly in a Joint Simon versus an Individual go/no-go task. The JSE may stem from spontaneous action co-representation of a social partner's frame-of-reference, which creates a spatial overlap between stimulus-response location in the Joint (but not Individual) task. However, JSE's domain-specificity is debated. We investigated the potential content of co-representation during task-sharing—typical geometric stimuli were replaced with two coloured sets of animal silhouettes. Each set was assigned to either the participant themselves or their partner. Critically, a surprise image recognition task followed, aiming to identify any partner-driven effects in incidental memory exclusive to the Joint task-sharing condition, versus the Individual condition. Bayesian statistics indicated a robust absence of the key JSE, limiting interpretations of incidental memory findings, with implications regarding JSE's replicability.

Children actively and selectively transmit information to others based on the type of information and the context during learning. Four- to 7-year-old children preferentially transmit generalizable information in teaching-like contexts. Although 2-year-old children are able to distinguish between generalizable and non-generalizable information, it is not known whether they likewise transmit generalizable information selectively. We designed a behavioral study to address this question. Two-year-old children were presented with three novel boxes, identical except for their color. In each box, one of two equally salient actions led to a generalizable outcome (e.g., playing a [different] tune in each box), whereas the other led to a non-generalizable outcome (e.g., turning on a light, vibrating the box, or making a noise). In the discovery phase, children had a chance to discover the functions of each box presented one-by-one. Then, in the exploration phase, they were given the opportunity to independently explore all three boxes presented together. Finally, in the transmission phase, an ignorant recipient entered the room and asked the child to show them how these toys work. We measured whether children preferentially transmitted either generalizable or non-generalizable information when they were asked to demonstrate the function of the toys to a naïve adult. We found that children did not display any preference for transmitting generalizable information. These findings are discussed with respect to toddlers’ selectivity in transmitting information but also the development of sensitivity to information generalizability. Research Highlight: Young children transmit information to others and do so with some degree of selectivity to a variety of factors. Generalizability is an important factor affecting information transmission, and older children tend to associate generalizable information with teaching-like interactions. We tested whether toddlers selectively transmitte

Implicit mentalising involves the automatic awareness of others’ perspectives, but its domain-specificity is debated. The Joint Simon task demonstrates implicit mentalising as a Joint Simon Effect (JSE), proposed to stem from spontaneous action co-representation of a social partner’s frame-of-reference in the Joint (but not Individual) task. However, evidence also shows that any sufficiently salient entity (not necessarily social) can induce the JSE. Here, we investigated the content of co-representation through a novel Joint Simon task where participants viewed a set of distinct images assigned to either themselves or their partner. Critically, a surprise image recognition task allowed us to identify partner-driven effects exclusive to the Joint task-sharing condition, versus the Individual condition. We did not observe a significant JSE, preventing us from drawing confident conclusions about the effect’s domain-specificity. However, the recognition task results revealed that participants in the Joint task did not recognise their partner’s stimuli more accurately than participants in the Individual task. This implies that participants were no more likely to encode content from their partner’s perspective during the Joint task. Overall, this study pushes methodological boundaries regarding the elicitation of co-representation in the Joint Simon task and demonstrates the potential utility of a surprise recognition task.

Research shows that questionable research practices (QRPs) are present in undergraduate final-year dissertation projects. One entry-level Open Science practice proposed to mitigate QRPs is “study preregistration,” through which researchers outline their research questions, design, method, and analysis plans before data collection and/or analysis. In this study, we aimed to empirically test the effectiveness of preregistration as a pedagogic tool in undergraduate dissertations using a quasi-experimental design. A total of 89 UK psychology students were recruited, including students who preregistered their empirical quantitative dissertation (n = 52; experimental group) and students who did not (n = 37; control group). Attitudes toward statistics, acceptance of QRPs, and perceived understanding of Open Science were measured both before and after dissertation completion. Exploratory measures included capability, opportunity, and motivation to engage with preregistration, measured at Time 1 only. This study was conducted as a Registered Report; Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/9hjbw (date of in-principle acceptance: September 21, 2021). Study preregistration did not significantly affect attitudes toward statistics or acceptance of QRPs. However, students who preregistered reported greater perceived understanding of Open Science concepts from Time 1 to Time 2 compared with students who did not preregister. Exploratory analyses indicated that students who preregistered reported significantly greater capability, opportunity, and motivation to preregister. Qualitative responses revealed that preregistration was perceived to improve clarity and organization of the dissertation, prevent QRPs, and promote rigor. Disadvantages and barriers included time, perceived rigidity, and need for training. These results contribute to discussions surrounding embedding Open Science principles into research training.

The population group with which one associates curiosity the most is children. To this day, however, only two caregiver reports have been developed to capture variability in children’s curiosity (Piotrowski et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2023). Both are based on specific theoretical frameworks: the interest-deprivation theory (Litman & Jimerson, 2004) and the violation of expectation framework (e.g., Stahl & Feigenson, 2015). Here, we present a novel measure of general curiosity for children between the ages of 2 and 5 years, in which curiosity is captured more broadly where behavioral expressions were not constrained to any specific theoretical framework. The measure is based on the recently created Infant and Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire (ITCQ; Altmann et al., in prep), currently undergoing validation, which is applicable to infants up to 2 years of age. For the novel Early Child Curiosity Questionnaire (EECQ), we adapted and extended the item list to capture how this slightly older age group may explore their environment to learn about it. The new questionnaire consists of 41 items covering various exploratory behaviors such as “My child pokes at and probes objects to see how they feel (e.g., cotton balls, play dough, tree bark, etc.)” and “My child typically seeks clarification for things they do not understand (e.g., how something works)”. Caregivers are asked to consider the last six months and rate each item on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (‘strongly disagree’) to 7 (‘strongly agree’) as to how well it reflects their child’s typical behavior. The measure is currently being piloted in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands; thus, we aim to present preliminary results of this international collaboration. The measure will be further developed, and its convergent and discriminant validity evaluated, establishing its internal and external validity for capturing individual differences in curiosity. As a result of this work, the newly developed EECQ will help us better

Debates concerning social learning in the behavioral and the developmental cognitive sciences have largely ignored the literature on social influence in the affective sciences despite having arguably the same object of study. We argue that this is a mistake and that no complete model of social learning can exclude an affective aspect. In addition, we argue that including affect can advance the somewhat stagnant debates concerning the unique characteristics of social learning in humans compared to other animals. We first review the two major bodies of literature in nonhuman animals and human development, highlighting the fact that the former has adopted a behavioral approach while the latter has adopted a cognitive approach, leading to irreconcilable differences. We then introduce a novel framework, affective social learning (ASL), that studies the way we learn about value(s). We show that all three approaches are complementary and focus, respectively, on behavior toward; cognitions concerning; and feelings about objects, events, and people in our environment. All three thus contribute to an affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) story of knowledge transmission: the ABC of social learning. In particular, ASL can provide the backbone of an integrative approach to social learning. We argue that this novel perspective on social learning can allow both evolutionary continuity and ontogenetic development by lowering the cognitive thresholds that appear often too complex for other species and nonverbal infants. Yet, it can also explain some of the major achievements only found in human cultures.

To shed light on the key premise of the bifocal stance theory (BST) that social learners flexibly take instrumental and ritual stances, we focus on developmental origins of child-led information transmission, or teaching, as a core social learning strategy. We highlight children's emerging selectivity in information transmission influenced by epistemic and social factors and call for systematic investigation of proposed stance-taking.

The effect of interpersonal behavioral synchrony on children’s behavior is an emerging field rich with research potential. While studies demonstrate its effect on affiliative and prosocial outcomes, the role of synchronized movement on children’s specific learning outcomes has not yet been investigated experimentally. One possibility is that synchrony, as a coordinated social activity, encourages perceived social bonds, leading to heightened attention, and better information retention. Equally likely is that physiological, rather than social learning, mechanisms mediate the effect, given the previously demonstrated role of autonomic arousal in attentional fluctuations, cognitive engagement, problem solving, exploration, and curiosity. The present study investigated the behavioral and physiological effects of synchrony conceptualized as induced, interpersonal, behavioral, movement-based interaction, on word learning in 2.5-year-old children. In a laboratory experiment, toddlers engaged in either a synchronous or an asynchronous movement-based interaction with an adult experimenter while listening to an upbeat children’s song. After the (a)synchronous movement episode, the same experimenter engaged children in a word learning task. During the (a)synchrony and learning phases, children’s physiological arousal was continuously recorded, resulting in heart rate and skin conductance response measures. Following a caregiver-child free play break, children were tested on their novel word retention. The results indicated that children learned novel labels at equal rates during the learning phase in both conditions, and their retention at test did not differ between conditions: although above chance retention of novel labels was found only following the synchronous, but not the asynchronous episode, the cross-episode comparisons did not reach statistical significance. Physiological arousal indices following the (a)synchrony episode did not differ between conditions and did no

There are numerous theoretical frameworks attempting to define and explain curiosity, such as the knowledge gap theory (Loewenstein, 1994), the interest-deprivation theory (Litman & Jimerson, 2004), as well as the early, influential specifications of Berlyne (e.g. epistemic vs. perceptual curiosity and specific vs. diverse exploration, 1960). However, the concept remains elusive with open questions especially regarding its emergence and mechanisms in infancy. While there are several self-report measures for adult and some for child curiosity relating to the aforementioned theories, there has not been any measure developed yet for infants. Here, we present a newly developed caregiver-report questionnaire measuring infants’ general curiosity across a target age range of 5 to 24 months. Rather than constraining behavioral expressions of curiosity to a specific theoretical framework, we instead adopt a broad definition of infant curiosity as a keen desire or tendency to actively explore one’s immediate surroundings. We developed 36 items reflecting various behaviors and developing skills with which infants can actively explore and interact with their environment from birth onwards. Caregivers are asked to evaluate how well each item reflects their child’s typical behavior on a Likert-scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) with an option of ‘not applicable (NA)’ for behaviours the child does not display (perhaps because they are too young). An item applicable for younger infants is for instance “When my child encounters an object, they are likely to put it in their mouth for further inspection (e.g., to see what it feels or tastes like).” Other items referring to skills such as interacting socially (e.g., “When reading a picture book together, my child directs me (e.g., by pointing) towards what they want to know more about.”) may only become applicable later on. The survey was piloted on N = 22 participants of a constrained age group (Mage = 11.53, 41% f

This is a Registered Report, in-principle acceptance, to appear in Developmental Science. Abstract: The cognitive mechanisms and benefits of active learning in early child development are poorly understood. The current study will investigate 18-month-old infants’ curiosity-driven information selection in a novel word learning task, designed to identify any potential advantage for active learning over passive learning. In a gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigm, infants in one condition will be given the opportunity to structure their own information seeking to actively create word learning opportunities for themselves, while infants in two other conditions will engage in learning novel words passively. Infants’ learning of word-object associations will be compared across active and passive learning paradigms. This study will advance our understanding of early word learning, and of the mechanisms and benefits of active, curiosity-based learning in infants.

Debates concerning social learning in the behavioral and the developmental cognitive sciences have largely ignored the literature on social influence in the affective sciences despite having arguably the same object of study. We argue that this is a mistake and that no complete model of social learning can exclude an affective aspect. In addition, we argue that including affect can advance the somewhat stagnant debates concerning the unique characteristics of social learning in humans compared to other animals. We first review the two major bodies of literature in nonhuman animals and human development, highlighting the fact that the former has adopted a behavioral approach while the latter has adopted a cognitive approach, leading to irreconcilable differences. We then introduce a novel framework, affective social learning (ASL), that studies the way we learn about value(s). We show that all three approaches are complementary and focus, respectively, on behavior toward; cognitions concerning; and feelings about objects, events, and people in our environment. All three thus contribute to an affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) story of knowledge transmission: the ABC of social learning. In particular, ASL can provide the backbone of an integrative approach to social learning. We argue that this novel perspective on social learning can allow both evolutionary continuity and ontogenetic development by lowering the cognitive thresholds that appear often too complex for other species and nonverbal infants. Yet, it can also explain some of the major achievements only found in human cultures.

Infants are not passive recipients of information but are curious learners who explore their world based on their intrinsic motivation. We review the main theories of the mechanisms underlying curiosity – the search for information for its own sake – and the means by which infants explore their environment, ranging from visual examination of objects to manual exploration and requesting information from social partners.

Supporting the central claim that knowledge representation is more basic than belief representation, we focus on the emerging evidence for preverbal infants' active and selective communication based on their representation of both knowledge and ignorance. We highlight infants' ontogenetically early deliberate information seeking and information transmission in the context of active social learning, arguing that these capacities are unique to humans.

Infants explore the world to learn about it based on their intrinsically motivated curiosity. However, the mechanisms underlying such exploratory behavior are largely unknown. We propose a new theory in which active learners explore randomly until encountering a familiar entity (e.g. a second stimulus from a previously encountered category) because here, learning is suddenly maximized. Such a category will then be exploited as long as the learning progress is above an individually varying ‘boredom threshold’; Above this threshold, learning is rewarding – positively reinforcing exploitation. Below this threshold, the learning progress is too small to be rewarding, and they will return to random exploration. The threshold itself can be lowered through inhibition, allowing sustained attention despite smaller learning progress. Here, we will first test this theory in a gaze-contingent eye-tracking task: 10-month-old infants will be introduced to two novel stimulus categories with 30 exemplars each (Fribbles, TarrLab). Two identical “houses” will be presented on a computer screen, and a new exemplar from either category will be revealed when the infant fixates on the corresponding house. This design will enable us to distinguish between exploration – switching from one category to the other – and exploitation – consecutively triggering exemplars from the same category. In follow-on studies we will test older children as well as adults, who will be able to trigger exemplar presentations via key presses. Across age groups, we will measure the number, speed, and sequence of trigger-events, as well as the switches between categories. We hypothesize that if a category was triggered twice it is more likely to be triggered again; the first two triggers establish familiarity and allow for learning which will be rewarding, reinforcing further exploitation. While the length of ‘exploitation-runs’ may differ between participants (representing varying boredom thresholds), constant s

Infants explore the world to learn about it based on their intrinsically motivated curiosity. However, the mechanisms underlying such exploratory behaviour are largely unknown. Here, we will address this question by investigating infants’ choices of exploring diverse information vs. exploiting more familiar information in a gaze-contingent eye-tracking task. In our initial study, 10-month-old infants will be introduced to two novel stimulus categories with 30 exemplars each (Fribbles, TarrLab). Two identical “houses” will be presented on a computer screen, and a new exemplar from either category will be revealed when the infant fixates on the corresponding house. This design will enable us to distinguish between exploration – switching from one category to the other – and exploitation – consecutively triggering exemplars from the same category. In follow-on studies, we will test older children as well as adults, who will be able to trigger exemplar presentations via key presses. Across age groups, we will measure the number, speed, and sequence of trigger-events, as well as the switches between categories. Thereby, we will investigate to what extent exploratory behaviour is comparable across participants and if there are systematic individual differences between weighing exploration against exploitation. As the outcome of this research, we expect to better understand the developmental trajectory of curious, active exploration including possible individual differences. Additionally, we plan to explore whether such characteristics are stable over time and whether they relate to other measures of personality and cognitive development. In conclusion, we aim to build a comprehensive new body of research crucially integrating a universal perspective on infant curiosity with a focus on individual differences (PerezEdgar et al., 2020).

Children are active participants in the social knowledge exchange process, but little is known about how this exchange manifests in the first two years of life. This thesis explores active social learning strategies underlying both knowledge acquisition and knowledge transmission in infants aged 11-24 months. Comprising three experimental chapters, this thesis demonstrates infants’ sensitivity to the informative potential of their social partners and their epistemic value, their active and selective information seeking in situations of epistemic uncertainty, and their preferential information transmission based on a combination of social and non-social factors. Experimental Chapter 1 shows that 11-month-olds communicatively respond to their social partners following epistemic violation of expectation events and do so based on the social partner’s epistemic status. Experimental Chapter 2 demonstrates that 12-month-olds selectively solicit epistemic information from more knowledgeable social partners when facing a situation of referential uncertainty. Experimental Chapter 3 reports that 24-month-olds’ propensity for active information transmission to less knowledgeable social partners is modulated by information complexity but not the pedagogical context of information acquisition. Overall, this thesis contributes to the literature on cognitive development of social learning strategies for acquisition and transmission of knowledge, with a special emphasis on elucidating the ontogeny of active interrogative communication skills. The overarching conclusion stemming from this work highlights that far from being passive receptacles of knowledge, infants actively partake in the bi-directional process of social knowledge exchange.

When presented with a claim that contradicts their intuitions, do children seize opportunities to empirically verify such claims or do they simply acquiesce to what they have been told? To answer this question, we conducted a replication of Ronfard, Chen, and Harris (2018, conducted in the People’s Republic of China) in two countries with distinct religious and political histories (Study 1: Belarus, N = 74; Study 2: Turkey, N = 79). Preschool children were presented with five, different-sized Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. All children selected the biggest doll. Half of the children then heard a (false) claim (i.e., that the smallest doll was the heaviest), contradicting their initial intuition. The remaining children heard a (true) claim (i.e., that the biggest doll was the heaviest), confirming their initial intuition. Belarusian and Turkish preschoolers typically endorsed the experimenter’s claim no matter whether it had contradicted or confirmed their initial intuition. Next, the experimenter left the room, giving children an opportunity to check the experimenter’s claim by picking up the relevant dolls. Belarusian and Turkish preschoolers rarely explored the dolls, regardless of the type of testimony they received and continued to endorse the counter-intuitive testimony they received. Furthermore, in Study 2, Turkish preschoolers continued to endorse smallest = heaviest even when doing so could have cost them a large reward. In sum, across two different cultural contexts, preschool children endorsed a counter-intuitive claim and did not spontaneously seek evidence to test it. These results confirm and extend those of Ronfard et al. (2018).

Active social communication is an effective way for infants to learn about the world. Do pre‐verbal and pre‐pointing infants seek epistemic information from their social partners when motivated to obtain information they cannot discover independently? The present study investigated whether 12‐month‐olds (N = 30) selectively seek information from knowledgeable adults in situations of referential uncertainty. In a live experiment, infants were introduced to two unfamiliar adults, an Informant (reliably labeling objects) and a Non‐Informant (equally socially engaging, but ignorant about object labels). At test, infants were asked to make an impossible choice—locate a novel referent among two novel objects. When facing epistemic uncertainty—but not at other phases of the procedure—infants selectively referred to the Informant rather than the Non‐Informant. These results show that pre‐verbal infants use social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/23dLPsa-fAY Research highlights Twelve‐month‐olds reliably assessed the informative potential of the available social partners and selectively queried the best source only when information was needed. Pre‐verbal infants used social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit. Social referencing served as a communicative means to seek epistemic rather than emotionally laden information in the situation of referential uncertainty. Results indicate that infants actively participate in the cultural interpersonal process of knowledge transmission, using basic non‐verbal communicative tools at their disposal.

Children are sensitive to both social and non-social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children’s learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola (2015) showed that 2-year-olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non-pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non-social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non-pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.

The premise that underlies this volume is that there are strong interconnections between wonder, education and human flourishing. And more specifically, that wonder can make a significant difference to how well one’s education progresses and how well one’s life goes. The contributors to this volume – both senior, well-known and beginning researchers and students of wonder – variously explore aspects of these connections from philosophical, empirical, theoretical and practical perspectives. The three chapters that comprise Part I of the book are devoted to the importance of wonder for education and for human flourishing. Part II contains four chapters offering conceptual analyses of wonder and perspectives from developmental psychology and philosophy (Spinoza, Wittgenstein, philosophy of religion). The seven chapters that form Part III contain a wealth of ideas and educational strategies to promote wonder in education and teacher education. This volume not only underlines and articulates the importance of wonder in education and in life but also offers fresh perspectives, allowing us to look with renewed wonder at wonder itself.

Infants are not passive recipients of information but are curious learners who explore their world based on their intrinsic motivation. We review the main theories of the mechanisms underlying curiosity – the search for information for its own sake – and the means by which infants explore their environment, ranging from visual examination of objects to manual exploration and requesting information from social partners.

Active social communication is an effective way for infants to learn about the world. Do pre‐verbal and pre‐pointing infants seek epistemic information from their social partners when motivated to obtain information they cannot discover independently? The present study investigated whether 12‐month‐olds (N = 30) selectively seek information from knowledgeable adults in situations of referential uncertainty. In a live experiment, infants were introduced to two unfamiliar adults, an Informant (reliably labeling objects) and a Non‐Informant (equally socially engaging, but ignorant about object labels). At test, infants were asked to make an impossible choice—locate a novel referent among two novel objects. When facing epistemic uncertainty—but not at other phases of the procedure—infants selectively referred to the Informant rather than the Non‐Informant. These results show that pre‐verbal infants use social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/23dLPsa-fAY Research highlights Twelve‐month‐olds reliably assessed the informative potential of the available social partners and selectively queried the best source only when information was needed. Pre‐verbal infants used social referencing to actively and selectively seek information from social partners as part of their interrogative communicative toolkit. Social referencing served as a communicative means to seek epistemic rather than emotionally laden information in the situation of referential uncertainty. Results indicate that infants actively participate in the cultural interpersonal process of knowledge transmission, using basic non‐verbal communicative tools at their disposal.

Studies of emotion vocabulary and understanding typically focus on early childhood. Yet, emotion abilities continue to develop into adolescence, making it an important and underinvestigated area of research. This study presents evidence that adolescents’ emotion vocabulary undergoes active development, becomes more broad and sophisticated, varies by gender, and is not captured adequately by recognition-based approaches. Adolescents were asked to generate emotion words for five emotion categories—happy, relaxed, angry, sad, and nervous. Responses included emotion words (e.g., joyous) and nonemotion terms such as metaphors (e.g., boiling), social experiences (e.g., underappreciated), and personality traits (e.g., shy). Girls generated significantly more responses than boys. Older adolescents generated significantly more emotion words (e.g., describing someone who is happy as joyful, exuberant or ecstatic), while younger adolescents produced more nonemotion responses (e.g., describing someone who is happy as smiley, friendly, or full of life). Students’ grade, total number of responses they produced, and performance on the recognition test of emotion understanding predicted their emotion vocabulary.

Two-year-old children are more likely to transmit new information after learning it in a pedagogical rather than an intentional but non-pedagogical context (Vredenburgh, Kushnir, & Casasola, 2015). In the present study we asked whether action complexity could mediate the effect of pedagogical cues on information transmission. Twenty-four-month-old children (N = 31) interacted with two unfamiliar adults who demonstrated them two actions leading to a comparable outcome on two novel toys. One of the demonstrators showed a simpler action in an intentional, but non-pedagogical manner, while the other showed a more complex action in a pedagogical manner by using verbal cues, direct eye contact, and child-directed speech. Following demonstration, children were equally likely to imitate both actions, but achieved the action outcome significantly more often with the simpler action. The children were then encouraged to demonstrate either action to an ignorant familiar adult who was not present during demonstrations. While children showed both actions during transmission, they were significantly more likely to demonstrate the simple action, even though it was presented without the explicit pedagogical cues. These results suggest that action complexity may undermine the role of explicit pedagogical cues in information transmission mechanisms in infancy.

How do high school students approach academic and creative challenges? This study compares the content of academic and creative challenges for 190 high school students, and examines students’ intentions to persist. Students reported experiencing academic and creative challenges in different areas: academic challenges were described primarily in math/science and English, with themes related to time management and striving to improve, while creative challenges were described overwhelmingly in art and music and concerned problem solving difficulties. Students reported more interest and intention to persist in the creative than academic challenges. Interest was the strongest predictor of persistence across both academic and creative challenges. The divergent perceptions of creative and academic challenges suggest that capitalizing on the creative elements of academic assignments could boost student interest and subsequent persistence.