Driven to Understand: Investigating Toddlers’ Intrinsic Motivation to Resolve Ambiguity About Their Own Competence

Abstract

Exploration is a cornerstone of early learning, yet it remains unclear whether toddlers use it not only to investigate the world around them but also to probe their emerging abilities. This thesis examines whether young children are intrinsically motivated to resolve uncertainty about their own competence through play. Across two experiments, toddlers were presented with pairs of practical life toys—one previously explored independently (unconfounded) and one explored in a way that left their own role ambiguous (confounded). In Experiment 1, toddlers systematically preferred the confounded toy, suggesting a drive to explore their own competence. Experiment 2 extended this finding by introducing tasks of varying difficulty. Pilot data revealed that toddlers’ preferences to explore the confounded toy increased with task difficulty, providing preliminary evidence that toddlers selectively explore toys when doing so provides information about their own competence—but not when the toys are trivial. Together, these findings suggest that toddlers are not just curious about how the world works—they are also motivated to understand how they work within it. This early sensitivity to self-relevant uncertainty may serve as a foundation for metacognitive development and learning motivation later in life.