Feedback-learning in 3-year-olds

Abstract

Even though feedback-learning is already important from very early on, much is still unknown about the strategies young children employ when learning from feedback. Kendler’s levels of functioning theory (1979) states that there are different strategies we can employ to learn simple (i.e. one-dimensional) rules from feedback: incremental learning and hypothesis testing. Infants and young children seem to start out with slow, associative incremental learning, although direct evidence herefore is lacking. When they grow older, at least some of the four-year-old children, apply a verbal-based, hypothesis testing strategy that allows for more efficient learning (Schmittmann, van der Maas & Raijmakers, 2012). This switch in reliance seems to take place somewhere around age three or four. Importantly, during that same period, a child’s executive functions develop, possibly facilitating a switch in learning strategy. Whether and how 3-year-olds learn, and how this development is related to executive functions is still largely unknown, since rule-learning in 3-year-olds has scarcely been studied. Therefore, this study will investigate the learning strategies of 3-year-olds in simple rule-learning tasks and their relation with children’s executive function