Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America.
Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2022 Jun 1;18(6):e1010120. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010120. eCollection 2022 Jun.
Accurate assessment of environmental controllability enables individuals to adaptively adjust their behavior-exploiting rewards when desirable outcomes are contingent upon their actions and minimizing costly deliberation when their actions are inconsequential. However, it remains unclear how estimation of environmental controllability changes from childhood to adulthood. Ninety participants (ages 8-25) completed a task that covertly alternated between controllable and uncontrollable conditions, requiring them to explore different actions to discover the current degree of environmental controllability. We found that while children were able to distinguish controllable and uncontrollable conditions, accuracy of controllability assessments improved with age. Computational modeling revealed that whereas younger participants' controllability assessments relied on evidence gleaned through random exploration, older participants more effectively recruited their task structure knowledge to make highly informative interventions. Age-related improvements in working memory mediated this qualitative shift toward increased use of an inferential strategy. Collectively, these findings reveal an age-related shift in the cognitive processes engaged to assess environmental controllability. Improved detection of environmental controllability may foster increasingly adaptive behavior over development by revealing when actions can be leveraged for one's benefit.
准确评估环境可控性使个体能够自适应地调整行为——在期望的结果取决于自身行为时利用奖励，而在自身行为无关紧要时最小化代价高昂的思考。然而，目前尚不清楚环境可控性的评估是如何从儿童期到成年期发生变化的。90 名参与者（8-25 岁）完成了一项任务，该任务在可控和不可控条件之间秘密交替，要求他们探索不同的行为来发现当前环境可控性的程度。我们发现，虽然儿童能够区分可控和不可控条件，但可控性评估的准确性随着年龄的增长而提高。计算模型表明，虽然年轻参与者的可控性评估依赖于通过随机探索获得的证据，但年龄较大的参与者更有效地利用任务结构知识进行高信息量的干预。工作记忆的年龄相关改善介导了这种从依赖随机探索的证据转向更具推断性策略的定性转变。总的来说，这些发现揭示了评估环境可控性所涉及的认知过程的年龄相关转变。随着对环境可控性的检测能力的提高，通过揭示何时可以利用自身的行为获益，可能会促进个体在发展过程中表现出越来越适应的行为。
