Blanco Nathaniel J, Sloutsky Vladimir M
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210, United States of America.
Cognition. 2020 Sep;202:104327. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104327. Epub 2020 May 25.
Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularly valuable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision-making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children's choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children's tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children's systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.
探索对于发现世界如何运转至关重要。探索对幼儿尤其有价值，因为他们对世界了解甚少。决策理论将系统性探索描述为主要由自上而下的认知控制驱动，而这种控制在幼儿中并不成熟。最近的研究表明，尽管控制不成熟，但一种系统性探索在幼儿的选择中占主导地位，这表明它可能由不同机制驱动。我们假设幼儿广泛分配注意力的倾向会促进更高水平的探索，并且通过自下而上的注意力捕获中断注意力的分散分配也会扰乱系统性探索。我们通过在一个简单的选择任务中操纵选项的显著性来检验这一假设。显著性扰乱了系统性探索，从而表明注意力机制可能驱动儿童的系统性探索行为。我们认为这两者可能都是幼儿更广泛地收集信息这一更大倾向的一部分。
