The article deals with topical issues of educational and research activity of children as one of the types of activities that determines the course of mental and personal development of the child at the stage of early childhood. Today one of the main directions in the system of education is the formation of a socially active person, able to navigate in today's information technology environment where you need to show exploratory behavior. According to the Federal state educational standard of preschool education (GEF), cognitive research involves the study of objects of the surrounding world and experimenting with them. This paper analyzes the main approaches to understanding research behavior and experimentation in research on pedagogy and psychology. So, experimentation stands out as the main form of orienting-research (search) activity (N. N. Poddjakov, A. N. Poddjakov); exploratory behavior is a universal feature of human activity, one of the most effective mechanisms of learning (N. N. Poddjakov); research activities concern: 1) child's activity aimed at cognition of things device, connections between the phenomena of the world and their ordering and systematization (N. A. Korotkov), 2) a certain set of related actions (operations), under which children receive knowledge about the object or phenomenon (I. I. Levashev). According to the author, educational and research activity based on their natural curiosity and cognitive needs of children, is a means and a mechanism of socio-communicative development of preschool children.