Models of the explore-exploit problem have explained how children's decision making is weighed by a bias for information (directed exploration), randomness, and generalization. These behaviors are often tested in domains where a choice to explore (or exploit) is guaranteed to reveal an outcome. An often overlooked but critical component of the assessment of explore-exploit decisions lies in the expected success of taking actions in the first place-and, crucially, how such decisions might be carried out when learning from others. Here, we examine how children consider an informal teacher's beliefs about the child's competence when deciding how difficult a task they want to pursue. We present a simple model of this problem that predicts that while learners should follow the recommendation of an accurate teacher, they should exploit easier games when a teacher overestimates their abilities, and explore harder games when she underestimates them. We tested these predictions in two experiments with adults (Experiment 1) and 6- to 8-year-old children (Experiment 2). In our task, participants' performance on a picture-matching game was either overestimated, underestimated, or accurately represented by a confederate (the "Teacher"), who then presented three new matching games of varying assessed difficulty (too easy, too hard, just right) at varying potential reward (low, medium, high). In line with our model's predictions, we found that both adults and children calibrated their choices to the teacher's representation of their competence. That is, to maximize expected reward, when she underestimated them, participants chose games the teacher evaluated as being too hard for them; when she overestimated them, they chose games she evaluated as being too easy; and when she was accurate, they chose games she assessed as being just right. This work provides insight into the early-emerging ability to calibrate explore-exploit decisions to others' knowledge when learning in informal pedagogical contexts.
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Depression and anxiety are common, highly co-morbid conditions associated with a range of learning and decision-making deficits. While the computational mechanisms underlying these deficits have received growing attention, the transdiagnostic vs. diagnosis-specific nature of these mechanisms remains insufficiently characterized.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFbioRxiv
October 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN 55455.
The explore/exploit tradeoff is a fundamental property of choice selection during reward-guided decision making. In perceptual decision making, higher certainty decisions are more motorically precise, even when the decision does not require motor accuracy. However, while we can parametrically control uncertainty in perceptual tasks, we do not know what variables - if any - shape motor precision and reflect subjective certainty during reward-guided decision making.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDev Sci
January 2025
Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Persistence on a task is both beneficial and costly, so it is important to understand how children learn to effectively balance between perseverance and seeking alternatives to reach a goal by monitoring their performance and tracking their progress over time ("adaptive persistence"). Typically developing children (N = 136) ages 3-7 years in the Midwest United States were invited to catch pretend fish at 7 ordered ponds with increasing numbers of fish. Unbeknownst to children, however, the probability of catching fish decreased across successive ponds, making it most rational to briefly "explore" new ponds to learn the payoff structure and then to "exploit" the earlier ponds before their chances ended.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
October 2024
Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
Decision to explore new options with uncertain outcomes or exploit familiar options with known outcomes is a fundamental challenge that the brain faces in almost all real-life decisions. Previous studies have shown that humans use two main explorative strategies to negotiate this explore-exploit tradeoff. Exploring for the sake of information is called directed exploration, and exploration driven by behavioral variability is known as random exploration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychol Rev
September 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia.
Just as animals forage for food, humans forage for social connections. People often face a decision between exploring new relationships versus deepening existing ones. This trade-off, known in optimal foraging theory as the , is featured prominently in other disciplines such as animal foraging, learning, and organizational behavior.
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