Knowledge in Sight: Toddlers Plan Efficient Epistemic Actions by Anticipating Learning Gains

Anticipating the learning consequences of actions is crucial to plan efficient information-seeking. Such a capacity is needed for learners to determine which actions are most likely to result in learning. Here, we tested the early ontogeny of the human capacity to anticipate the amount of learning gained from seeing. In Study 1, we tested infants’ capacity to anticipate the availability of sight. Fourteen-month-old infants (N = 72) were invited to search for a toy hidden inside a container. The participants were faster to attempt at opening a shutter when this action allowed them to see inside the container. Moreover, this effect was specifically observed when seeing inside the container was potentially useful to the participants’ goals. Thus, infants anticipated the availability of sight, and they calibrated their information-seeking behaviors accordingly. In Studies 2-3, we tested toddlers’ capacity to anticipate whether data would be cognitively useful for their goals. Two-and-a-half-year-olds (N = 72) had to locate a target character hidden among distractors. The participants flipped the characters more often, and were comparatively faster to initiate this action when it yielded access to visual data allowing them to locate the target. Thus, toddlers planned their information-seeking behaviors by anticipating the cognitive utility of sight. In contrast, toddlers did not calibrate their behaviors to the cognitive usefulness of auditory data. These results suggest that cognitive models of learning guide toddlers’ search for information. The early developmental onset of the capacity to anticipate future learning gains is crucial for active learning.

Changing Minds ― Epistemic Interventions in Causal Reasoning

Did Tom’s use of nuts in the dish cause Billy’s allergic reaction? According to counterfactual theories of causation, an agent is judged a cause to the extent that their action made a difference to the outcome (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2020; Gerstenberg, Halpern, & Tenenbaum, 2015; Halpern, 2016; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009). In this paper, we argue for the integration of epistemic states into current counterfactual accounts of causation. In the case of ignorant causal agents, we demonstrate that people’s counterfactual reasoning primarily targets the agent’s epistemic state – what the agent doesn’t know –, and their epistemic actions – what they could have done to know – rather than the agent’s actual causal action. In four experiments, we show that people’s causal judgment as well as their reasoning about alternatives is sensitive to the epistemic conditions of a causal agent: Knowledge vs. ignorance (Experiment 1), self-caused vs. externally caused ignorance (Experiment 2), the number of epistemic actions (Experiment 3), and the epistemic context (Experiment 4). We see two advantages in integrating epistemic states into causal models and counterfactual frameworks. First, assuming the intervention on indirect, epistemic causes might allow us to explain why people attribute decreased causality to ignorant vs. knowing causal agents. Moreover, causal agents’ epistemic states pick out those factors that can be controlled or manipulated in order to achieve desirable future outcomes, reflecting the forward-looking dimension of causality. We discuss our findings in the broader context of moral and causal cognition.

The Effect of Experience-Based Tangible User Interface on Cognitive Load in Design Education

Inclusion of tangible user interfaces can facilitate learning through contextual experience, interaction with the provided information, and epistemic actions, resulting in effecting learning in design education. The goal of this study is to investigate how tangible user interface (TUI) affects design learning through the cognitive load. Extended reality-based TUI and traditional desktop-based GUI were utilized to deliver the same information to two groups of students. The NASA TLX tool was used to measure students' perceived cognitive load after receiving information through the two modalities. Contemporary design pedagogy, the potential use of XR, design cognition, today's design learners experience-oriented lifestyle were combined to provide a theoretical framework to understand how information delivery modalities affect design learning. The results reveal that the use of XR-based TUIs decreases cognitive load resulting in enhanced experience and effective learning in design studios.

Backward Reasoning and Epistemic Actions in Discovering Processes of Strategic Games Problems

The paper focuses on the cognitive and epistemic characterization of backward reasoning in strategy games resolution. It explores the use of abstraction in context (AiC) theory as a tool for the analysis of the epistemic actions involved in these processes. We follow a qualitative methodology based on design experiments, focusing on a study carried out with mathematics and engineering students. The analysis allowed us to combine the two models derived from the epistemology of mathematical backward reasoning and AiC theory in a unified framework that allowed us to focus both short-term and long-term processes in mathematical activities. Recurring patterns of epistemic actions were identified.

Awareness of and awareness that: their combination and dynamics

The paper proposes a logical framework representing the notion of explicit knowledge as the combination of awareness of and awareness that. The setting, semantically combining neighbourhood models with ideas from awareness logic, separates the mere fact of entertaining some information (being aware of$\varphi$) from the acknowledgement that the information is indeed the case (being aware that$\varphi$ holds). The text discusses not only the main properties these concepts obtain under the given representation, but also several of the epistemic actions that can be defined, and the way they affect the agent’s awareness (and thus her knowledge).

Social epistemic actions

We consider the ways humans engage in social epistemic actions, to guide each other's attention, prediction, and learning processes towards salient information, at the timescale of online social interaction and joint action. This parallels the active guidance of other's attention, prediction, and learning processes at the longer timescale of niche construction and cultural practices, as discussed in the target article.