Child Development
Call for Papers for Special Section in Child Development: “The Development of Childhood Curiosity: Mechanisms, Measurement, and Impact”
Co-Editors: Marina Bazhydai, Elizabeth Bonawitz, Jamie Jirout, Kelsey Lucca, Jelena Obradović, Mathilde Prenevost
Child Development invites manuscripts for a special section on “The Development of Childhood Curiosity: Mechanisms, Measurement, and Impact”.
Research on curiosity has grown substantially over the past decade, with studies examining how children explore, ask questions, seek information, and respond to uncertainty across a wide range of ages and contexts (Jirout et al., 2024). This work has led to important discoveries that have advanced our understanding of the nature and function of curiosity across early childhood and has led to a broadly common shared framework: curiosity arises from some form of uncertainty or gap in knowledge or understanding, is intrinsically motivating, and tends to support cognition, learning, and a range of developmental outcomes.
In the wake of this growth, there is a body of literature that is increasingly difficult to synthesize: research has yielded mixed findings regarding the relations among different measures of curiosity, the extent to which curiosity predicts learning outcomes, and the mechanisms that motivate curiosity across ages and contexts. These variations may be developmentally meaningful because curiosity is not a single behavior that simply increases or decreases with age, but a changing coordination of uncertainty monitoring, motivation, information-seeking, social confidence, and learning goals. Thus, rather than measurement failure, these complex patterns of results may reveal important insights about what motivates curiosity and how it supports active learning or well-being across childhood.
Research that can disentangle different aspects of curiosity from a developmental perspective, such as between-trait and state-based conceptualizations of curiosity, or between interest-driven and uncertainty-driven curiosity (Piotrowski et al., 2014), can provide greater clarity into when and how age-related differences in curiosity emerge. The goal of this special section is to advance theories of curiosity (Grossnickle, 2016; Jirout & Klahr, 2012; Kidd & Hayden, 2015; Poli et al., 2024) by bringing together empirical research that offers a more integrated and comprehensive understanding of how curiosity emerges and changes across the lifespan.
This special section invites new empirical research on curiosity that explores how and when curiosity emerges, what shapes it, and how it supports development and learning from infancy through childhood (0 to 12 years). We encourage submissions that draw on diverse methodologies (lab-based experiments, surveys, observational, naturalistic methods, as well as systematic reviews and meta-analyses), use multiple methods to measure curiosity or multiple dimensions or aspects of curiosity, differentiate curiosity from other related constructs, and incorporate interdisciplinary perspectives from education, cognitive science, and anthropology. We are also interested in work conducted with traditionally underrepresented populations (e.g., racially/ethnically diverse children, children living in the Global South).
The special section will consider research that advances theoretical understanding of curiosity through empirical articles presenting original quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research on curiosity in development, and may also consider methodological contributions that introduce or refine tools and approaches for studying curiosity in children. Papers can address a wide range of topics, including, but not limited to:
- Research that examines the influence of contexts, goals, and age in shaping curiosity across domains and areas of interest (e.g., curiosity about people, facts, objects, ideas).
- Research that examines whether different curiosity measures capture a shared curiosity construct versus distinct mechanisms that vary by age, context, language, social confidence, task demands, and/or learning goals.
- Work that differentiates curiosity from related constructs, such as interest, creativity, motivation, desire to learn, and playfulness.
- Longitudinal investigations of curiosity in childhood, individual differences, and the role of curiosity on a range of developmental outcomes.
- The development and validation of rigorous and innovative methodologies for measuring and studying curiosity that provide new insights into how curiosity emerges, develops, and supports learning.
- Cross-cultural investigations of curiosity in children.
Timeline
Authors who plan to submit a manuscript for the special section must submit a letter of intent (LOI) through the SRCD application site by December 1, 2026. The LOI must include:
- a tentative title
- an author list and contact details for the corresponding author
- a brief abstract (up to 1,000 words), including the research question, methods, including participants and data sources, all major findings, and a clear statement of how the submission uniquely advances our understanding of curiosity and how it develops. Abstracts not including results from completed research will not be reviewed. 1-2 Tables and/or Figures may be included.
The Special Section Co-Editors will review letters of intent for fit with the section and work to provide the broadest representation of high-quality papers. Following a review of the LOIs, potential contributors will be contacted by February 15, 2027, and asked to submit a full manuscript by May 15, 2027. Initial requests for revisions will be sent back to authors by or before September 15, 2027. We anticipate that the special issue will appear by mid/late 2028.