Chen, Xiaoyun

My name is Xiaoyun Chen, a post-doc researcher in the Wortschatzinsel lab of the University of Göttingen. Together with Prof. Dr. Nivedita Mani, we are working on the SFB project researching the inter-relationships of curiosity and social interactions through development using interdisciplinary research methods. Curiosity is the intrinsic motivation to explore and acquire information from the environment, which plays an essential role in cognitive development. As humans, we are highly sociable and rely on acquiring information from others. Thus, in this project, we investigate the relationships between curiosity and learning under diverse social contexts. More specifically, we examine how a learner’s prior knowledge of the task materials, prior experience with social partners and their social partner’s decisions would impact their curiosity-driven learning and the subsequent information sampling. Before I join the Wortschatzinsel, I study the curiosity-driven learning mechanisms of infants and adults for my PhD at Lancaster University in the UK.