Children’s Sensitivity to Difficulty and Reward Probability When Deciding to Take on a Task

Wang, Jinjing Jenny; Bonawitz, Elizabeth

doi:10.1080/15248372.2022.2152032

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Just as the preschoolers in our study weighed the potential of exploration to inform future decision-making, a learner might consider whether the effort expended on mental search outweighs the benefit to future explanatory reasoning. Such behavior would be consistent with computational models of belief revision (e.g., Bonawitz, Denison, Gopnik, & Griffiths, 2014 ), resource-rational decision-making (e.g., Lieder & Griffiths, 2020 , see Persaud et al, 2020 for developmental commentary), and recent empirical evidence that preschoolers trade-off cognitive effort and expected reward in deciding whether to tackle new problems (Wang & Bonawitz, 2022 ). Our finding that preschoolers’ explore-exploit decisions are sensitive to the expected value and utility of information gain offers novel avenues for better understanding choices to adhere to or abandon beliefs during learning.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

“…When asked to judge the goodness of uncertain options, children appropriately weight an outcome's intrinsic reward amount by the probability of this outcome occurring (Anderson, 1980;Bayless & Schlottmann, 2010;Schlottmann, 2001;Schlottmann & Anderson, 1994;Schlottmann & Tring, 2005). They can even integrate the probability of a reward with the expected cost (difficulty) of completing an action ( Wang & Bonawitz, 2022).…”

Section: Situational Factors In Early Exploration Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What’s in the Box? Preschoolers Consider Ambiguity, Expected Value, and Information for Future Decisions in Explore-Exploit Tasks

Lapidow,

Bonawitz

2023

Open Mind

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Self-directed exploration in childhood appears driven by a desire to resolve uncertainties in order to learn more about the world. However, in adult decision-making, the choice to explore new information rather than exploit what is already known takes many factors beyond uncertainty (such as expected utilities and costs) into account. The evidence for whether young children are sensitive to complex, contextual factors in making exploration decisions is limited and mixed. Here, we investigate whether modifying uncertain options influences explore-exploit behavior in preschool-aged children (48–68 months). Over the course of three experiments, we manipulate uncertain options’ ambiguity, expected value, and potential to improve epistemic state for future exploration in a novel forced-choice design. We find evidence that young children are influenced by each of these factors, suggesting that early, self-directed exploration involves sophisticated, context-sensitive decision-making under uncertainty.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

Section: Situational Factors In Early Exploration Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s in the Box? Preschoolers Consider Ambiguity, Expected Value, and Information for Future Decisions in Explore-Exploit Tasks

Lapidow,

Bonawitz

2023

Open Mind

Self Cite

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“…Our findings leave open several other avenues for future research. First, it would be interesting to examine how children's challenge-seeking for fun is affected by individual differences in in persistence (Leonard et al, 2021;Wang & Bonawitz, 2022), grit (Duckworth et al, 2007), mindset (Dweck, 2006), or social inference (Bass et al, 2021). Second, our experiments offer insight into children's judgments of fun, but did not explicitly assess children's opinions of how much fun each feature setting might be and intentionally did not measure children's experience of fun.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fun isn’t easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” vs. “playing to win”

Rule,

Goddu,

Chu

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Play appears in many cultures and species, but its purpose remains mysterious. Here, we investigate children’s goals during play, which may help to illuminate play’s function. In two preregistered experiments, we presented 5-to-10-year-old children (n = 124) with a novel game, and directly compared their judgments about how to best configure the game when playing for fun (“have as much fun as you can”) or trying to win (“knock down all the blocks to win stickers”). We found that for task-relevant factors, children chose more difficult settings when playing for fun than when trying to win. For task-irrelevant factors, children generally preferred settings that demanded flexible behavior, such as high randomness and novelty. These results suggest that children approach play as an opportunity for gaining internal and intrinsic rewards, rather than externally-defined rewards. We discuss several hypotheses about the nature of these internal rewards.

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“…While the ability to monitor one's own performance appears to be present already in infants , it has been shown that 5-year-olds might struggle to use this spontaneously but can when encouraged to do so (O'Leary & Sloutsky 2017). A recent study explored the extent to which 4-5-year-old children are sensitive to cognitive costs and reward probability when making decisions (Wang & Bonawitz 2023). Using a simple counting task that required children to count two quantities, compare their magnitude, and select the larger of the two, the authors show that children decide to give up more (persist less) when the task required more cognitive control and even more so when the likelihood of a reward was low.…”

Section: How Effort and Reward Guide Cognitive Control Allocation Thr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Rational Account of Cognitive Control Development in Childhood

Steinbeis

2023

Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol.

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Cognitive control is defined as a set of processes required for the organization of goal-directed thoughts and actions. It is linked to success throughout life including health, wealth, and social capital. How to support the development of cognitive control is therefore an intensively discussed topic. Progress in understanding how this critical life skill can be optimally scaffolded in long-lasting ways has been disappointing. I argue that this effort has been hampered by the predominant perspective that cognitive control is a competence or ability, the development of which is driven by predetermined maturational sequences. I propose that this traditional view needs to be overhauled in light of a growing body of evidence suggesting that cognitive control allocation is a both highly dynamic and rational process subject to cost–benefit analyses from early in development. I discuss the ramifications of shifting our perspective on cognitive control mechanisms in relation to how we design interventions. I close by spelling out new avenues for scientific inquiry. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 5 is December 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Children’s Sensitivity to Difficulty and Reward Probability When Deciding to Take on a Task

Cited by 6 publications

References 48 publications

What’s in the Box? Preschoolers Consider Ambiguity, Expected Value, and Information for Future Decisions in Explore-Exploit Tasks

What’s in the Box? Preschoolers Consider Ambiguity, Expected Value, and Information for Future Decisions in Explore-Exploit Tasks

Fun isn’t easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” vs. “playing to win”

A Rational Account of Cognitive Control Development in Childhood

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