The development of adaptive decision making: Recognition-based inference in children and adolescents.

Abstract

Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on the structure of the environment, particularly the predictive power (validity) of recognition. Little is known about developmental differences in use of the RH. In this study, the authors examined (a) to what extent children and adolescents recruit the RH when making judgments, and (b) around what age adaptive use of the RH emerges. Primary schoolchildren (M = 9 years), younger adolescents (M = 12 years), and older adolescents (M = 17 years) made comparative judgments in task environments with either high or low recognition validity. Reliance on the RH was measured with a hierarchical multinomial model. Results indicated that primary schoolchildren already made systematic use of the RH. However, only older adolescents adaptively adjusted their strategy use between environments and were better able to discriminate between situations in which the RH led to correct versus incorrect inferences. These findings suggest that the use of simple heuristics does not progress unidirectionally across development but strongly depends on the task environment, in line with the perspective of ecological rationality. Moreover, adaptive heuristic inference seems to require experience and a developed base of domain knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record

Good + Bad = ? Developmental Differences in Balancing Gains and Losses in Value‐Based Decisions From Memory

“…For instance, we used a selection of perceptual stimuli whose arbitrary associations with values had to be learned in an initial study phase. Although this approach provides good experimental control over prior knowledge and stimulus features, it is important to extend the research on cost‐benefit decisions to other environments in which children might use natural associations between real‐world objects (e.g., toys, snacks, or other familiar items) and subjective value, based on individual learning histories (e.g., Horn, Ruggeri, & Pachur, ). It is also an open question whether the current findings generalize to other nonmonetary forms of cost and benefits (beyond point values, tokens, and monetary payoffs).…”

“…In all present analyses, the upper boundary was associated with "accept" decisions and the lower boundary with "reject" decisions; s was fixed at 1. Adapted with permission from Horn, Bayen, and Smith (2013).…”

Within-person adaptivity in frugal judgments from memory

“…Specifically, the r -model provides probability estimates for the reliance on recognition (parameter r ), for the cue validity of further knowledge, and of recognition. Further details are in “ Appendix A ” (Hilbig et al 2010 ; Horn et al 2015 , 2016 ; we also explored a memory-state model extension that did not alter the main conclusions in the present study; see Castela, Kellen, Erdfelder, Hilbig, 2014 ).…”

Icon arrays help younger children's proportional reasoning

“…In many real-life situations, decisions have to be made under limited time, and it is known that adults adapt to time limitation using faster and simpler (Ben Zur & Brenitz, 1981;Payne, Bettmann, & Johnson, 1988), but not necessarily more effective (Belling, Suss, & Ward, 2015) strategies. Recent work has shown that children are ecological learnersthey modify their learning strategies to the characteristics of the task at hand (Horn, Ruggeri, & Pachur, 2016;Nelson, Divjak, Gudmundsdottir, Martignon, & Meder, 2014;Ruggeri & Lombrozo, 2015), and they do so already by age 4 (Ruggeri, Sim, & Xu, 2017). The effects of time limitation on the efficiency of children's reasoning are mixed.…”