COVID-19 and the 2021 U.S. Capitol attacks have highlighted the potential dangers of pseudoscientific and conspiratorial belief adoption. Approaches to combating misinformed beliefs have tried to "pre-bunk" or "inoculate" people against misinformation adoption and have yielded only modest results. These approaches presume that some citizens may be more gullible than others and thus susceptible to multiple misinformed beliefs. We provide evidence of an alternative account: it's simply too hard for all people to be accurate in all domains of belief, but most individuals are trying. We collected data on a constellation of human beliefs across domains from more than 1,700 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and find misinformed beliefs to be broadly, but thinly, spread among the population. Further, we do not find that individuals who adopt one misinformed belief are more likely to engage in pseudoscientific or conspiratorial thinking across the board, in opposition to "slippery slope” notions of misinformation adoption.

We apply a new quantitative method for investigating how children's exploration changes across age in order to gain insight into how exploration unfolds over the course of a human life from a life-history perspective. In this study, different facets of exploratory play were quantified using a novel touchscreen environment across a large sample and wide age range of children in the USA (n = 105, ages = 1 year and 10 months to 12 years and 2 months). In contrast with previous theories that have suggested humans transition from more exploratory to less throughout maturation, we see children transition from less broadly exploratory as toddlers to more efficient and broad as adolescents. Our data cast doubt on the picture of human life history as involving a linear transition from more curious in early childhood to less curious with age. Instead, exploration appears to become more elaborate throughout human childhood. This article is part of the theme issue 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.

In two experiments, we experimentally manipulated people's subjective opinions about new wellness trends using positive clips from publicly available YouTube videos. Participants spontaneously judged novel statements that were consistent with their new opinion to be factual, despite the fact that they had encountered no direct evidence for any of the statements. Belief change was stronger among participants whose opinions were more swayed by the manipulation. Positive opinions also biased participants' curiosity such that they were highly motivated to learn more about opinion-congruent statements. In Study 2, participants reported false memories for the opinion-congruent statements within the video. These results illustrate the primary role of subjective opinions in belief formation about objective truths, and suggest that the eradication of misinformation is an incomplete solution for societal disagreements.

Given the vast nature of information available in the world,humans must select a small subset from which to learn in alifetime. Yet we know little about the factors that motivatelearners’ decisions to attend to select certain informationsources over others. We investigate the role of topicknowledge on curiosity in a new domain: novel news stories.We influenced listeners’ perception of their topic knowledgein these novel domains by independently varying the numberof sentences they heard and the number of sentences thatremained after a decision point. Listeners were most curiouswhen they reported intermediate levels of topic knowledge.As expected, learners were less likely to switch away fromcontent that they were curious about. This resultdemonstrates that topic knowledge directly impacts learners’curiosity and thus has downstream influences on their futureinterests and information-seeking behaviors.

Previous literature has explored how factors such as maturation, attachment style, and security influence children’s freeplay behavior. The present study investigates a previously unexplored factor: peer presence. This is an important consideration because much of children’s play and early learning occurs in a social context with siblings and friends. We tested children (ages 2 to 11) from two different cultural environments: the lowlands of Bolivia, the home of a group of Amazonian farmer-foragers called the Tsimane’ (Experiment 1), and the United States (Experiment 2). We presented groups of children from both cultures with a set of toys hidden in envelopes to explore and discover either with a familiar peer or without. Tsimane’ children discovered significantly more objects in the presence of a peer, over and above the effect that would be expected from simply having two children search the toys independently in parallel. Additionally, Tsimane’ children discovered more objects as a function of age. The United States children did not exhibit the same pattern of behavior. Peer presence facilitated exploration in younger children but inhibited exploration in older children, relative to exploration rate without the peer. Taken together, peer presence facilitates exploration among young children across both cultures. However, among older U.S. children, peer presence inhibited exploration. We propose that the positive effect of peer presence on discovery rate may be driven by an increase in competition for resource control. The differences among older children across cultures may be an artifact due to experience with formal schooling

Creators and consumers of popular media for kids tend to equate children's sustained attention with learning (Gahan, 2022; Segal, 2022). Here, we demonstrate that greater sustained visual attention does not necessarily translate to better learning—and in fact may predict learning deficits in some cases. We present the results of an empirical eye tracking study in which we demonstrate that attentionally captivating material can lead to worse learning with greater attentional capture, likely due to either distraction or overstimulation. Children who engaged most during a word-learning task learned the fewest word-object associations when they were presented on a colorful, moving background. These results support theories that suggest attentional capture due to perceptual attractors (e.g., things that are ”bright, shiny”) can disrupt learning. This work underscores the importance of the quality of screen-based media when considering the potential harms of children's screen time

Efficient algorithms can enhance problem-solving in many cognitive domains but can be difficult to discover and use. For example, classical studies of seriation suggest that children struggle to apply algorithmic strategies in a simple sorting problem. We investigate the spontaneous discovery of algorithmic solutions across development. We gave children a variant of the sorting problem with hidden object ranks. Children sort animated bunnies into the right order, from the shortest to the tallest, when the bunnies are standing behind a wall so their heights are not visible. Children performed far above chance on this difficult sorting task, potentially because higher demands in memory and reasoning incentivized strategic behaviors. Children independently discovered at least two efficient algorithmic solutions to the sorting problem, Selection sort and Shaker sort. This result suggests that children are far more competent at sorting tasks than previous research would suggest. Additionally, older children were more efficient sorters than younger children. This suggests that competent performance on sorting tasks improves throughout development.

How do children decide when to fact-check a claim? In two studies and a simulation, we show that children use environmental cues about informational reliability to rationally adapt their information seeking to enable the efficient detection of misinformation. In Study 1, children exposed to an environment containing some misinformation (as opposed to all true information) sampled more evidence before verifying a test claim in a novel domain. In Study 2, children showed a graded sensitivity to environmental reliability: information seeking increased linearly with the proportion of false statements heard during exposure. Additionally, these statements were presented as online search results, which demonstrated that children make sophisticated inferences about their informational environments, beyond speaker-specific cues, to adjust their skepticism toward new information. These results further emphasize the importance of considering the environmental context of learning when developing interventions to promote healthy skepticism and lifelong learning.

It can be difficult to uncover the truth when presented with two conflicting beliefs. Adults integrate beliefs in a rational way by placing more weight on beliefs help with high confidence than beliefs with low confidence. Here, we investigate the development of this rational integration in 5- to 10-year-old children. Children at all ages selected the higher confidence belief if confidence differed, and older children (8-10) preferred an integrated belief when two informants presented beliefs with equal confidence. We interpret this as evidence that children use expressed confidence to inform rational decision-making, consistent with the principles of rational cue combination.