What do children know in known-item search: Young children’s picture book reading and search strategies

Abstract

Young children have a demand for familiar picture books for repeated reading and thus have a need to search for picture books. Therefore, understanding their information search strategies and developing young children’s appropriate information organization is crucial. This study employed the visual search paradigm design to conduct eye-tracking experiment on 3–6 year old children’s attention to picture book elements during reading and subsequent search and relevance judgment process. This research involved 34 children, and the results revealed three findings. First, main characters and key items received significantly higher levels of visual attention during reading and served as robust memory anchors during search, indicating their central role in children’s mental representation of the story. Second, scenes and titles showed limited attentional engagement and did not improve performance in either search or relevance judgment tasks, suggesting they are inefficient cues for young children. Third, young children’s mental representations of known books were highly specific and image-based, with strong sensitivity to visual consistency, indicating that their memory is rooted in concrete identity rather than texts. This study not only shed light on children’s picture book search strategies but also inspired the development of information search systems tailored to young children.