Emotional expressions are abundant in children’s lives. What role do they play in children’s causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others’ emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0–4.9; N = 112, the United States) learned about one salient causal function of a novel toy and then saw an adult play with it. Children explored the toy more when the adult expressed surprise than when she expressed happiness (Experiment 1), but only when the adult already knew about the toy’s salient function (Experiment 2). These results suggest that children consider others’ knowledge and selectively interpret others’ surprise as vicarious prediction error to guide their own exploration.

中文翻译：

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学龄前儿童共同考虑他人的情绪表达和先前的知识来决定何时探索

情感表达在儿童的生活中非常丰富。他们在孩子的因果推理和探索中起什么作用？本研究调查学龄前儿童是否利用他人的情绪表达来推断未知因果函数的存在并据此引导他们的探索。儿童（年龄：3.0-4.9 岁；N  = 112，美国）了解了一个新玩具的一个显着因果函数，然后看到一个成年人玩它。当成人表达惊讶时，儿童对玩具的探索比成人表达快乐时更多（实验 1），但前提是成人已经知道玩具的显着功能（实验 2）。这些结果表明儿童会考虑他人的知识，并有选择地将他人的惊讶解释为替代性预测 错误 引导自己的探索。