Storybooks on exploration can nurture children’s curiosity

Most very young children are insatiably curious, constantly exploring and questioning their world. This openness to new discoveries can make them better learners than adults. But research shows that by about the age of six, their unbridled curiosity starts to wane, and this can hamper their ability to learn and solve problems.

Surprisingly, there's been little research into whether it's possible to intervene to stop this decline, write the authors of a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. But in their new work on young children, aged three to six, they found that simply varying the messages that were embedded in a storybook could make a difference.

Julie Vaisarova at Arizona State University and colleagues studied 138 participants in the US and, to broaden the cultural background of the sample, another 88 in Turkey. In the first stage of the experiment, the children listened to an experimenter reading one of two versions of an illustrated 10-minute-long story over Zoom.

Both stories featured a character called Scuba Sam. With the help of a map and some hints, Sam searched a group of islands for treasure. In one version of the story, designed to reflect traditional educational approaches, Sam carefully followed a number of rules and instructions about what to do, and when experimenter asked the child a question, the potential responses were always limited. (For example, 'Do you see Sam's binoculars?')

In the other version of the story (the 'strategic curiosity' condition), however, Sam embraced uncertainty as a cue to explore — they chose to explore a new island, rather than to return to one they had already visited, for example — and they responded flexibly to new information. Sam also kept an eye on the time allowed for the treasure hunt, and made sure they had enough time to visit all of the islands marked on the map. In this version of the story, the experimenter asked the children open-ended questions, such as 'What do you think Sam should do to find out if this is the treasure island?'

After the story, a different experimenter took over. They introduced the child to a game, which featured a virtual aquarium consisting of five fish tanks, some of which contained more concealed sea creatures than others. The children were told that there were different creatures hiding in each, and that they had a total of 15 minutes to find them. They were also encouraged to play the game 'like Sam'. For the group that had heard the 'traditional' story, this meant "following the rules and checking for all your clues". For the other, it was "staying curious and paying careful attention to everything around you".

The team found that overall, the two groups found about the same number of sea creatures. However, there were some differences in how they performed the task. While the children who had listened to the 'traditional' story often ran out of time to explore all of the tanks, those in the 'curiosity' group prioritised visiting multiple tanks over deeply exploring individual ones, and were more likely to get through them all. This group also spent longer searching tanks that appeared to contain relatively more creatures, even if it took some time to find those creatures; this demonstrated greater 'strategic persistence', the team writes.

The researchers found no differences between the children from the US or Turkey, suggesting that children from different cultures would respond on a similar way. However, there were a few limitations to the study. The design meant it was not possible to tell whether the 'curiosity' story really did enhance the children's willingness to explore more broadly — or whether the 'traditional' story reduced it. Also, the children played the game immediately after listening to the story, so we don't know how long the impacts on their thinking and strategising might last.

However, given the evidence that children's thinking starts to narrow by about the age of six, "finding ways to broaden children's exploration is critical", the team writes. Their results do suggest that adjusting the messages that children hear in stories may help with this. "This shift in the verbal messages children hear could have important implications for their learning and problem solving," the team concludes.

Read the paper in full:

Vaisarova, J., Kiefer, S. L., Şen, H., Todd, P. M., & Lucca, K. (2024). Where should I search next? Messages embedded in storybooks influence children's strategic exploration in Turkey and the United States. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(8), 2174–2192. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001619

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