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Results indicate infants grasp core principles, including how novelty and uncertainty motivate information acquisition and how attempts aim to maximize information gain, suggesting early development of “epistemic sense”.",{"@graph":14,"@context":72},[15,34,55],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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development?",{"text":71,"@type":63},"Infants show a nuanced grasp of principles guiding others’ epistemic actions, including motivations from uncertainty and novelty, and expectations about maximizing information gain, indicating early-emerging concepts for understanding epistemic aspects of behavior.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":32,"og:type":74,"og:title":10,"og:site_name":45,"og:description":12},"article",{"robots":76,"canonical":32},"index,follow",{"doc_id":78,"site_id":7},450292,1791053348,{"code":4,"msg":81,"data":82},"success",[83,87,91,95,100,105,110,114,119,122,126],{"id":22,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":84,"show_sort_weight":85,"slug":86},"Story & 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nature.com/scientificreports)  \nOPEN  \nHuman infants appreciate that information bears value for other individuals  \nBálint Varga􀀍 & Ágnes Melinda Kovács  \nHumans’ ability to recognize each other as seekers of information is crucial for effectively sharing knowledge, evaluating confidence, and reasoning about the role of knowledge in behavior. Here, we investigate the foundations ofthis ’epistemic sense’ through a series of looking-time experiments, asking whether 14-month-old human infants recognize and evaluate the information-directed goals behind others’ actions. In Experiments 1-3, we assess infants’ understanding of scenarios where an individual seeks information driven by uncertainty or curiosity about objects. In Experiment 4, we examine their expectations regarding the efficiency of such information seeking. Our results indicate that infants have a nuanced grasp of the principles guiding others’ epistemic actions, including how uncertainty and novelty motivate information seeking, and that they also have expectations about the efficiency of such attempts in terms of maximizing information gain. This suggests that the foundational concepts for understanding the epistemic aspects of others’ behavior develop early on.  \nIn environments where resources are scarce or volatile and relevant states are ambiguous or unobservable, gathering information is essential for survival and success. Hence, forms of information search are prevalent across species, ranging from active sensing behaviors, such as eye movements1 or echolocation2, through longterm exploration, like mapping the terrain while foraging3, to experimentation4 and social interrogation5,6. Consequently, information seeking became a frequent target of scientific investigation: its efficiency6,7, motivations8, phylogenesis9, neural underpinnings10, 11, as well as its roles in cognitive development12–16, cooperation17, machine learning18, medicine19, or economy20 are studied extensively. For us humans, information-seeking (or epistemic) actions are crucial not only for efficiently building internal models15,21, acquiring different skills22, or making decisions7, but also for carrying out even our everyday activities. Consider, for example, the following actions during a bus ride: reading the news, glancing at the doors to select the best exit as your stop approaches, and watching your steps while getting off. While browsing the news is a well-recognized case of information seeking, the subsequent actions are also information-directed in nature, even if they seem so automatic that they may be overlooked as such.  \nGiven their widespread nature, exploratory actions also become recurring targets of third-party observation and interpretation in social scenarios. In other words, other individuals’ consistent need and pursuit of information enables us, as observers, to continuously reassess and interpret their epistemic states and underlying goals. We seem to be surprisingly good at such assessments. Recent research shows that human adults can distinguish knowledge-seeking goals based solely on kinematic cues, such as how someone shakes a box to discover the type versus the number of objects inside23. Adults can also infer the value that inquisitive individuals place on apiece of information based on the effort they exert to obtain it, and even children can successfully perform such inferences24, suggesting a possibly early-developing human competence to reason about information-directed behaviors.  \nHowever, how we recognize an action as information gathering in the first place is still an open question. Although stereotypical forms of active information gathering may exist, virtually any action can serve epistemic purposes. Hence, it is not trivial how people identify them. The present paper aims to contribute to understanding the core processes involved in this interpretative capacity by examining its rudimentary forms in early dev","cbCaidT1WtkiGKmK","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaidT1WtkiGKmK","pdf",2200774,12,"English","# Introduction\n## Epistemic goals and information sharing\n## Information seeking across species and in development\n## Social interpretation of epistemic actions\n## Open question: identifying information gathering\n## Study aims and developmental rationale\n## Infant evidence and action understanding","[{\"question\":\"What is the main goal of this study?\",\"answer\":\"To understand how infants develop the interpretative ability to recognize others’ actions as information-seeking and to evaluate the underlying epistemic goals.\"},{\"question\":\"How do the experiments test infants’ understanding?\",\"answer\":\"The paper reports a series of looking-time experiments: Experiments 1–3 assess responses to uncertainty- or curiosity-driven information seeking, and Experiment 4 evaluates expectations about the efficiency of such behavior.\"},{\"question\":\"What do the findings suggest about early development?\",\"answer\":\"Infants show a nuanced grasp of principles guiding others’ epistemic actions, including motivations from uncertainty and novelty, and expectations about maximizing information gain, indicating early-emerging concepts for understanding epistemic aspects of behavior.\"}]","Human infants appreciate that information bears value for other individuals - Article | PDF",1790732787]