​​Social curiosity, a desire to learn about others, may play an important role in socio-cognitive development in early childhood. However, we poorly understand whether and how social curiosity is elicited. In this study, we examined the malleability of social curiosity in young children by developing a “Social Uncertainty Paradigm.” Children aged 5 to 8 (30 collected, target N = 105) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Social Curiosity (SC), General Curiosity (GC), or No Curiosity (NC)) and introduced two learning objectives: the new person (Sam) and new object (Apple House). Participants had 10 chances to gather information about either Sam and the Apple House. In SC, participants obtained 4 times more facts about Sam than the Apple House. The reverse was true for GC. To maximize uncertainty (a lack of information), the experimenter remarked about the difference in the amount of information they gathered. In NC, participants obtained the same amount of facts about Sam the Apple House. Next, participants’ social curiosity were measured with two tasks: Choice Task measuring their preference for learning between Sam and the Apple House and Rating Task measuring the degree to which they want to learn more about both Sam and the Apple House (5-point Likert scale). Preliminary results suggest that creating uncertainty in social information elicits social curiosity and is associated with more active information seeking behaviors to fill the knowledge gap. The current study will provide practical information that could be used for creating social curiosity-promoting environments.

Environmental factors, including parents, play an important role in promoting children’s curiosity. Though curiosity is rooted in infancy, little is known about how parent-child interactions affect infants’ curiosity. The current study investigated the different ways parents promote curiosity through their infants’ exploration of a novel toy. We observed parent–child interactions between 39 parent-infant dyads in a semi-structured naturalistic 10-minute free play session. During the last 5 minutes of the session, parents were tasked with introducing a novel toy (i.e. a knotted foam curler) to the session, with no further instructions. Parent exploration-promoting and infant-exploratory behaviors during those 5 minutes were coded using a newly developed coding scheme, “Parental roles in Infant Curiosity through Exploration” (PICE). Findings revealed that when infants explored the novel toy, parents were more likely to observe rather than promote the exploration. However, when parents did promote the novel toy, infants were more likely to explore it if parents used explicit verbal cues. The study's focus on exploration-promoting verbal and nonverbal behaviors enables researchers to identify specific parenting behaviors that may have a significant impact on infant development and in turn, help develop interventions to support parents in fostering their children's curiosity and promoting early learning.