Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK.
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2022 Jul;219:105401. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105401. Epub 2022 Mar 1.
The willingness to take a risk is shaped by temperaments and cognitive abilities, both of which develop rapidly during childhood. In the adult developmental literature, a distinction is drawn between description-based tasks, which provide explicit choice-reward information, and experience-based tasks, which require decisions from past experience, each emphasizing different cognitive demands. Although developmental trends have been investigated for both types of decisions, few studies have compared description-based and experience-based decision making in the same sample of children. In the current study, children (N = 112; 5-9 years of age) completed both description-based and experience-based decision tasks tailored for use with young children. Child temperament was reported by the children's primary teacher. Behavioral measures suggested that the willingness to take a risk in a description-based task increased with age, whereas it decreased in an experience-based task. However, computational modeling alongside further inspection of the behavioral data suggested that these opposite developmental trends across the two types of tasks both were associated with related capacities: older (vs. younger) children's higher sensitivity to experienced losses and higher outcome sensitivity to described rewards and losses. From the temperamental characteristics, higher attentional focusing was linked with a higher learning rate on the experience-based task and a bias to accept gambles in the gain domain on the description-based task. Our findings demonstrate the importance of comparing children's behavior across qualitatively different tasks rather than studying a single behavior in isolation.
冒险意愿受到气质和认知能力的影响，这两者在儿童时期都迅速发展。在成人发展文献中，区分了基于描述的任务和基于经验的任务，前者提供明确的选择-奖励信息，后者需要根据过去的经验做出决策，每种任务都强调不同的认知需求。尽管已经对这两种类型的决策进行了发展趋势的研究，但很少有研究在同一批儿童样本中比较基于描述和基于经验的决策制定。在当前的研究中，儿童（N=112；5-9 岁）完成了专门为幼儿设计的基于描述和基于经验的决策任务。儿童的气质由儿童的主要教师报告。行为测量表明，在基于描述的任务中冒险意愿随着年龄的增长而增加，而在基于经验的任务中则随着年龄的增长而减少。然而，计算模型以及对行为数据的进一步检查表明，这两种类型的任务的相反发展趋势都与相关能力有关：年龄较大（与年龄较小）的儿童对经验损失的敏感性更高，对描述奖励和损失的结果敏感性更高。从气质特征来看，较高的注意力集中与基于经验的任务上更高的学习率以及基于描述的任务上接受赌博的偏向有关。我们的研究结果表明，比较儿童在不同性质的任务中的行为而不是孤立地研究单一行为的重要性。
