Curious Choices: Infants' moment-to-moment information sampling is driven by their exploration history

Infants explore the world around them based on their intrinsically motivated curiosity. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying such curiosity-driven exploratory behaviour remain largely unknown. Here, infants could freely explore two novel categories, triggering a new exemplar from a category by fixating on either of the two associated areas on a computer screen. This gaze-contingent design enabled us to distinguish between exploration – switching from one category to another – and exploitation – consecutively triggering exemplars from the same category. Data from 10 to 12-month-old infants ( N = 68) indicated that moment-to-moment sampling choices were non-random but guided by the infants' exploration history. Self-generated sequences grouped into three clusters of brief yet explorative, longer exploitative, and overall more balanced sampling patterns. Bayesian hierarchical binomial regression models indicated that across sequence patterns, infants' longer trigger time, shorter looking time, and more gaze-shifting were associated with trial-by-trial decisions to disengage from exploiting one category and making an exploratory switch, especially after consecutively viewed stimuli of high similarity. These findings offer novel insights into infants' curiosity-driven exploration and pave the way for future investigations, also regarding individual differences. • A powerful new paradigm enabling active exploration in a controlled environment. • Infants' curiosity-driven exploration within this paradigm was non-random. • Infants generated different sampling patterns, from explorative to exploitative. • The largest emerging group, however, sampled information from both categories. • Exploration history and pre-switch behaviour predicted exploratory switching.