Individual and social learning without feedback, from infancy to childhood – LUCID

Children’s learning often benefits from explicit external feedback on their performance, such as guidance from adults. However, children also frequently acquire knowledge with minimal external input. The LUCID project aims to investigate this remarkable ability, focusing on how children acquire knowledge in social and individual domains from infancy through school age. The project hypothesizes that young children effectively guide their learning by leveraging their sense of confidence—the estimated reliability of their cognitive states and processes—to compensate for the absence of external feedback on their performance. LUCID is structured into three Work Packages (WPs), employing a mix of established and innovative methods to comprehensively explore the ontogenesis of learning without performance feedback across early childhood (from 1 to 8 years of age). The project’s findings could significantly impact our understanding of human cognitive development and education. It may reveal young children’s capacity to attune their cognition to confidence from infancy or identify gaps in their ability to learn without feedback.