Curiosity as a driver of learning in infancy

Prof. Dr. Gert Westermann opened the final day of The Active Child workshop with his talk about curiosity as a driver of learning in infancy. He has given here an overview of his work to show that infants' active information seeking is systematic and goal directed, and proposed that it can be understood as an outcome of interactions between the infant's internal knowledge state and the information structure of the environment. Prof. Dr. Westermann is a Professor of Psychology at Lancaster University, and is the Lancaster Director of ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LiCiD). His research areas include curiosity-based learning and development and object and word learning in infants.


About TAC workshop
The Active Child workshop (Nov 30-Dec 3, 2021), organised by the University of Göttingen and Uppsala University, aimed to bring together diverse perspectives on how young children selectively explore particular aspects of their rich environment and steer their own learning progress, with regard to the theories explaining how children contribute to their learning. It addressed the mechanisms that support active learning, and the methods that can be used to study this phenomenon. This series of talks and workshops covered varied topics such as the development of children’s active learning, the neurophysiological markers of active learning, the philosophy of curiosity-driven learning as well as the motor and socio-cognitive developmental milestones that underlie children’s active exploration.