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Category: Project

Description: Can we learn better by doing something ourselves or by watching somebody else do it? And if so, why? We present a new approach to examine this perennial question in research on learning. In a science learning task, 95 children aged 5 to 7 years could either test their own predictions (active condition) or they observed a fictitious other learner testing predictions (yoked condition). Unlike previous yoked designs, we first emulated responses from a Bayesian learner. Critically, these responses were then individually matched to each yoked child given their unique prior beliefs at the start of the experiment. This novel approach allowed us to discern the effects of self-directed activity on causal learning much more clearly than before. We found that actively generating predictions led to deeper conceptual understanding than observing another’s matched predictions.