Department of Psychology, University of California, 2121 Berkeley Way, Room 3302, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2020 Jul 20;375(1803):20190502. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0502. Epub 2020 Jun 1.
I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore-exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several lines of empirical evidence suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults. This article is part of the theme issue 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.
我认为，人类独特的、漫长的、受保护的童年期是人类生命史进化的结果，这使得我们在目标导向的开发需求出现之前，有一个广泛假设搜索和探索的早期阶段。这种认知特征也存在于其他动物身上，并与探索和玩耍等早期行为有关。我将这种发展模式与关于探索-开发权衡、搜索和抽样的计算思想以及神经科学发现联系起来。我还提出了几条经验证据表明，年轻的人类学习者在搜索外部信息和假设空间时都具有很强的探索性。事实上，他们有时比年长的学习者和成年人更具有探索性。本文是主题为“生命史与学习：童年、养育和老年如何塑造人类和其他动物的认知和文化”的特刊的一部分。
