Children are more exploratory and learn more than adults in an approach-avoid task

Liquin, Emily; Gopnik, Alison

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104940

Cited by 62 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Adults seem more motivated than children to maximize performance in these tasks. This interpretation is in line with results from reinforcement learning tasks where children demonstrate biases toward exploratory strategies, whereas adults consistently use strategies that maximize reward (Blanco & Sloutsky, 2019, 2020Gopnik, 2020;Liquin & Gopnik, 2022).…”

Section: Adults Generally Learn Better Than Childrensupporting

confidence: 84%

Auditory and visual category learning in children and adults

Roark¹,

Lescht²,

Wray³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that categories with different learning requirements may engage distinct learning and memory systems (e.g., explicit, procedural) with unique developmental trajectories. There is a limited understanding of how the development of perceptual and cognitive abilities in childhood influences category learning as prior studies have focused on learning in separate participants in a single modality. The current study presents a comprehensive assessment of category learning in 8-12-year-old children and adults. Across multiple sessions, each participant learned categories across modalities (auditory, visual) that tap into different learning systems (explicit, procedural). Unsurprisingly, adults outperformed children across all tasks. However, this enhanced performance was not symmetrical across categories and modalities. Adults far outperformed children in learning visual explicit categories and auditory procedural categories, with fewer differences across development for auditory explicit categories and visual procedural categories. Adults’ general benefit over children was due to enhanced efficiency of information processing, while the especially superior performance in the visual explicit and auditory procedural tasks was due to needing less information to make a decision. Overall, these results demonstrate an interaction between perceptual and cognitive development that influences learning in problems that are relevant for learning of real-world categories such as speech sounds and letter-phoneme categories in reading.

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Section: Adults Generally Learn Better Than Childrensupporting

confidence: 84%

Auditory and visual category learning in children and adults

Roark¹,

Lescht²,

Wray³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Finally, our study focused on young adults and 68.5% were college students. This could be important as explore-exploit behavior is known to change with age in childhood ( 49 ) and adolescence ( 48 ), which are key periods for the development of mental health. Students could also differ from non-students in the same age range (although we did not find evidence for differences between students and non-students on the measures included here).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interactions with sex were included because sex differences have been observed in both cognitive reflection measures (37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42) and symptoms of emotional disorders (43)(44)(45)(46)(47). Age was included due to previous work showing changes in exploratory behavior across childhood and adolescence (48,49). Models included exploration measures as predictors of depression/anxiety symptoms, cognitive reflection measures as predictors of exploration measures, and cognitive reflection measures as predictors of depression/anxiety symptoms.…”

Section: General Reflectiveness Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lower Levels of Directed Exploration and Reflective Thinking Are Associated With Greater Anxiety and Depression

et al. 2022

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Anxiety and depression are often associated with strong beliefs that entering specific situations will lead to aversive outcomes – even when these situations are objectively safe and avoiding them reduces well-being. A possible mechanism underlying this maladaptive avoidance behavior is a failure to reflect on: (1) appropriate levels of uncertainty about the situation, and (2) how this uncertainty could be reduced by seeking further information (i.e., exploration). To test this hypothesis, we asked a community sample of 416 individuals to complete measures of reflective cognition, exploration, and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found significant associations between each of these measures in expected directions (i.e., positive relationships between reflective cognition and strategic information-seeking behavior or “directed exploration”, and negative relationships between these measures and anxiety/depression symptoms). Further analyses suggested that the relationship between directed exploration and depression/anxiety was due in part to an ambiguity aversion promoting exploration in conditions where information-seeking was not beneficial (as opposed to only being due to under-exploration when more information would aid future choices). In contrast, reflectiveness was associated with greater exploration in appropriate settings and separately accounted for differences in reaction times, decision noise, and choice accuracy in expected directions. These results shed light on the mechanisms underlying information-seeking behavior and how they may contribute to symptoms of emotional disorders. They also highlight the potential clinical relevance of individual differences in reflectiveness and exploration and should motivate future research on their possible contributions to vulnerability and/or maintenance of affective disorders.

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“…Learning is akin to exploring, whereas acquiring may present a trade-off between exploration and exploitation because people choosing to acquire objects may balance between trying new options and sticking with familiar ones. So given the aforementioned developmental shift from explore to exploit (Gopnik, 2020 ; Liquin & Gopnik, 2022 ), we might have expected children to predominantly prefer having atypical items. Instead, we found that children and adults both preferred having familiar items.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Novelty preferences depend on goals

2022

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People are sometimes drawn to novel items, but other times prefer familiar ones. In the present research we show, though, that both children’s and adults’ preferences for novel versus familiar items depend on their goals. Across four experiments, we showed 4- to 7-year-olds (total N = 498) and adults (total N = 659) pairs of artifacts where one was familiar and the other was novel (e.g., a four-legged chair and ten-legged chair). In Experiment 1 , children wanted to have familiar artifacts, but to learn about novel ones. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern using a simpler procedure, and found the same pattern in adults. In Experiment 3 , 4- to 6-year-olds and adults more strongly preferred familiar items when choosing which they would rather have than when choosing which they would rather try using. Finally, Experiment 4 replicated adults’ preferences to have familiar items and learn about novel ones with an additional set of items. Together these findings show that preferences for novelty depend on people’s goals. We suggest these effects arise because children and adults are motivated both by the promise of information and the desire for safe options in high commitment decisions that entail risk. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-022-02118-9.

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Children are more exploratory and learn more than adults in an approach-avoid task

Cited by 62 publications

References 69 publications

Auditory and visual category learning in children and adults

Auditory and visual category learning in children and adults

Lower Levels of Directed Exploration and Reflective Thinking Are Associated With Greater Anxiety and Depression

Novelty preferences depend on goals

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