The question
What drives a learner to seek more information about the social world, and how does that motivation change as children develop? If we know when and why curiosity switches on, we can design content that meets learners where their attention already lives.
How I approached it
I designed and ran a three-study program with 669 participants across three developmental stages (ages 4 to 6, ages 7 to 9, and adults), using a forced-choice paradigm: each person saw matched pairs of behaviors and chose which one to learn more about. Every hypothesis and analysis was pre-registered, samples were powered in advance, and in-person testing of children was combined with an online adult panel so the findings would generalize across audiences.
From finding to design decision
Toggle between what the study found and what it means for a product or curriculum team.
Preference shown as Cohen's d. Data: Yonas & Heiphetz Solomon, Child Development (2024).
- Curiosity is not fixed; it follows a developmental arc. Older children and adults were markedly more curious about some events than others (effect sizes d = 0.52 to 0.63), while the youngest learners showed almost no preference (d = 0.12).
- The shift was driven by a specific cognitive change: older learners reason about the “why” behind behavior, and that reasoning, rather than simple surprise, is what turns curiosity on.
- The pattern held across two further studies that ruled out a competing explanation, so the conclusion rests on converging evidence rather than a single result.
My role
Lead researcher and first author. I owned the research questions, study design, instrument development, data collection, statistical analysis, and the written narrative end to end.
Methods & tools
The mechanics here are the mechanics of applied user and learner research: define a sharp question, instrument it cleanly, triangulate multiple sources, and separate the real signal from the plausible-but-wrong story. The audience changes; the rigor does not.
The one-pager
The same study, distilled to a single applied page. Reframes peer-reviewed findings for an education-outcomes audience.
Source study: Yonas, D., & Heiphetz Solomon, L. (2024). Age-related changes in information-seeking behavior about morally relevant events. Child Development. Funded by the National Science Foundation (#2044360) and the John Templeton Foundation (#61808).