# Research. How learning takes shape. Our research connects development, language, social understanding, and artificial intelligence. ## Questions, minds, and the answers between them Our work grew out of the Curiosity and Learning Lab. Development and learning connect our studies of information seeking, language, social understanding, and artificial agents. We work with children and adults, and we also test language models directly. ### Learning & inquiry How do people seek knowledge, and what do they do with an answer? We study questions, explanations, and the social conditions of learning. Our work with children examines how family beliefs, conversation, and answer quality shape inquiry. [Read the voice assistant preprint record](/research/children-voice-assistants.md) ### People & artificial agents We study how children and adults interact with AI, including chatbots, voice assistants, and social robots. Trust, information quality, and the decision to ask another question are central to this work. [Explore the AI trust study](/research/ai-trust.md) · [See the social robot study](/research/related-work.md#children-and-social-robots) ### Language & social understanding How do people understand what others know, believe, or intend? We examine social understanding through language and cognition. We also test how language models answer theory-of-mind questions in Turkish and English, examining the responses of the models themselves. [Read the language model study record](/research/theory-of-mind.md) ## Our developmental roots The early lab studied children’s everyday conversations, early science learning, storytelling, and spatial thinking. That work remains a substantial part of our research and informs broader questions about how people learn and understand one another. [Read our lab history](/about/history.md) · [Explore studies on families and children’s questions](/research/related-work.md) ## Research projects - [Children’s questions to people and voice assistants](/research/child-inquiry-project.md) is a TÜBİTAK 3501 project led by Burcu Ünlütabak at Yeditepe University. It connects studies of children’s questions, family beliefs, and interactions with artificial agents. - [AI trust and information seeking](/research/ai-trust.md) examines how clear or vague answers affect trust and the decision to ask for more information. It is part of our work on adults’ interactions with AI. The Association for Psychological Science listed this study in its 2026 poster program. - [Theory of mind in language models](/research/theory-of-mind.md) tests GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 directly with tasks about beliefs in Turkish and English. - [Literary readership and mentalisation](https://onurbal.com/en/academics/thesis/) is Onur Bal’s 2025 master’s thesis, supervised by Ünlütabak. It examined how literary reading relates to mentalisation and empathy in adult readers. ## Methods follow the question We use behavioral tasks, questionnaires, interviews, and analyses of human and model responses. Each design addresses a particular research question and population. In a Wizard-of-Oz experiment, a participant interacts with a system while a human operator controls some or all of its responses. In the children’s voice assistant study, an experimenter selected prepared answers. This let the team vary how much information each answer provided while controlling other features of the conversation. Our language model study used a different approach: the models received theory-of-mind tasks directly, and their answers and explanations were analyzed. ## Work in print The publication archive contains the journal article on language models and the preprint on children’s questions. Related work includes studies of adult social understanding, family beliefs, preschool inquiry, social robots, and conversations about health. [Browse publications](/publications.md) · [Explore related work](/research/related-work.md) --- [Curtainplate Laboratories](/index.md) · [Research](/research.md) · [People](/people.md) · [Publications](/publications.md) · [About](/about.md) · [Contact](/contact.md) · [Join us](/join.md) · [Take part](/participate.md) · [Privacy](/privacy.md)