{"pk":26769,"title":"Preschoolers evaluate risk and reward in exploration-exploitation tasks","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Children are drivers of their own discovery. To develop a complete characterization of the factors that drive explo-ration in early childhood, we must first understand how competing factors influence children’s decision making. We investigatedpreschool-aged children’s decision-making on explore-exploit tasks where the available information about the distribution ofrewards was controlled. When probability information is unknown, children preferred to exploit known rewards over exploringunknown ones. However, performance in Experiment 2 shows that children can use probabilistic information to form accurateexpectations about possible outcomes to effectively choose between exploiting and exploring. The degree to which individ-ual children are “exploratory” is also shown to be consistent over weeks, suggesting that individual children have “trait-like”exploratory drives. On aggregate, children incorporate these individual tendencies towards exploration or exploitation withprobability information; thus children readily form estimations of expected reward and use this information to guide efficientexploratory behavior.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2jc8404g","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lapidow","name_suffix":"","institution":"Rutgers University","department":""},{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"Baraff","last_name":"Bonawitz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Rutgers University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26769/galley/16405/download/"}]}