Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning about the self is one of the most challenging goals that young children face. Yet, much of the prior work on early learning and curiosity has focused on children’s tendency to attend to and explore the external world. Are children actually curious about themselves? The current study examines this question by investigating whether children actively seek information about what others think of their performance. Three- to five-year-old children participated in a task where an experimenter evaluated the quality of their drawing and of another child’s drawing. Children were then left alone with a folder that contained one of these drawings (Self or Other). Children were more likely to peek inside the folder when it contained their drawing than when it contained the other child's drawing. These preliminary findings suggest that children's curiosity about what others think of them may emerge early in life and manifest as active information-seeking behaviors.