Curiosity has been linked with many benefits, including increased overall well-being (Lydon-Staley et al., 2020) and greater academic achievement (Gottfried et al., 2016). The value that children place on learning new things and exploring novel ideas is unrivaled by older individuals. However, little research has been conducted to examine how parents may be able to help foster their children’s curiosity in a way that teaches them how to effectively search for and synthesize information. This paper aims to determine how parents’ language during a storybook task is related to their children’s strategy to collect rewards during a search game. Preliminary results suggest that parents may be able to encourage more effective search by asking more close-ended questions. These findings provide insight into how parents and guardians may be able to encourage their children to become better adept at searching for information by taking in clues about their environment and modifying their behavior to maximize their efforts.

This study investigates the effects of familiarity and the size of a novel object on perception of depth. Familiar size is a visual depth cue that provides information about the distance of an object. This project explores if the familiar size illusion is a result of an automatic perceptual process or an intellectual thought process. This data was collected in two phases, a familiarization phase and a testing phase. The experimental participants were familiarized for 30 seconds with a novel object, while the control group was not shown any objects prior to presentation of test objects. The novel test stimuli were constructed in 5 sizes and participants in the familiar group were familiarized with the medium size object. Participants were then asked to indicate the perceived distance of different sized objects by moving a rod with a pointer at the end to match the distance. The smaller comparison objects subtended visual angles that participants had not previously experienced, while larger comparison objects produced a larger visual angle than the participants had seen during the familiarization phase. The testing phase was identical for both familiar and unfamiliar control groups. Apparent distance was influenced by the size of the objects. Larger objects were judged to be closer than the smaller objects. Participants not familiarized showed smaller effects of stimulus size than the familiarized group. The effect of familiarity was not significant for the smaller stimuli but was very significant for the larger stimuli. The results were not consistent with the cognitive theory which argues that familiar size is a result of a conscious thought process. These outcomes are predicted under the model of familiar size being an automatic perceptual process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-cultural differences between the United States and Turkey by coding multiple dimensions, such as parental intrusiveness, child persistence, and various others. The main research questions of this paper were as follows: (1) How does parental intrusiveness vary by country? (2) How does child persistence vary by country? and (3) Are parental intrusiveness and child persistence correlated, and if so, what is the direction of the correlation? The hypotheses were that (1) Turkish parents would score higher on parental intrusiveness, (2) American children would show higher levels of persistence, and (3) Parental intrusiveness and child persistence are correlated, with higher levels of parental intrusiveness resulting in lower levels of child persistence. While all of the hypotheses were supported with statistically significant results, it was found that in the U.S., higher parental intrusiveness does result in lower levels of child persistence, but in Turkey, parental intrusiveness was not a predictor of child persistence. The findings are therefore able to support cross-cultural differences in the correlation between parental intrusiveness and child persistence.