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 around what learners at each age actually want to know.
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 changes with age. Older children and adults were markedly more curious about some events than others (effect sizes d = 0.52 to 0.63), while the youngest children showed almost no preference (d = 0.12).
- The shift tracked a specific cognitive change: older learners reason about why people behave the way they do, and mediation analyses showed that this reasoning, rather than surprise, accounted for the preference.
- 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 same ones applied user research runs on: a sharply defined question, clean instrumentation, and analyses designed to rule out the plausible-but-wrong story.
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).