From early childhood throughout early adulthood, individuals are under the supervision of parents, caregivers, teachers, advisors, and other experts. Typically, supervisors can influence, at least to some extent, the learning activities of young people. A basic trade-off emerges in the learning environments, such that a supervisor may wish to prevent the learner from making costly mistakes, but in doing so hinder the learning process. This research project develops a family of formal theoretical models of supervised learning, and analyzes their predictions. Within these models, key features of successful adult supervision identified in the child development literature may be understood as the result of the parent's optimizing behavior. Similarly, the analysis can shed light on the widely documented variability in parenting practices across different human societies, as well as across animal species.
Understanding the role of adults as experts supporting children's learning activities is a long-standing objective in developmental psychology, and the focus of a sizable experimental and empirical literature. The theoretical approach pursued in this project complements the mainly experimental and empirical approaches adopted in the child development literature.
