Children’s Pursuit of Counterintuitive Information in Books

For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children’s preference to engage with media that contains more mundane vs. more counterintuitive content. Children ranging from 3- to 8-years (N = 174), from the U.S. and Canada, were presented with pairs of books about animals. The two books in each pair were visually identical aside from their printed title. One book in each pair was described as presenting a fact that (according to validation data on children’s and adults’ beliefs in these facts) was relatively intuitive, and the other book was described as presenting a fact that was relatively counterintuitive. The youngest participants (3–4 years) demonstrated no preference in selecting books with intuitive vs. counterintuitive facts about animals, whereas older children (5-years onward) demonstrated an increasing preference for counterintuitive content. Combined with validation data on children’s and adults’ intuitions about the focal facts, these data suggest that children’s preference to seek information that adults deem counterintuitive (at least in the domain of biology) increases with age as a function of changes in the strength of children’s intuitions about what is possible.