New York University, New York, United States.
University of Maryland, College Park, United States.
Elife. 2023 Aug 16;12:e84260. doi: 10.7554/eLife.84260.
Across the lifespan, individuals frequently choose between exploiting known rewarding options or exploring unknown alternatives. A large body of work has suggested that children may explore more than adults. However, because novelty and reward uncertainty are often correlated, it is unclear how they differentially influence decision-making across development. Here, children, adolescents, and adults (ages 8-27 years, = 122) completed an adapted version of a recently developed value-guided decision-making task that decouples novelty and uncertainty. In line with prior studies, we found that exploration decreased with increasing age. Critically, participants of all ages demonstrated a similar bias to select choice options with greater novelty, whereas aversion to reward uncertainty increased into adulthood. Computational modeling of participant choices revealed that whereas adolescents and adults demonstrated attenuated uncertainty aversion for more novel choice options, children's choices were not influenced by reward uncertainty.
在整个生命周期中，个体经常在利用已知的奖励选项和探索未知的替代方案之间做出选择。大量研究表明，儿童可能比成年人更具有探索精神。然而，由于新奇性和奖励不确定性通常是相关的，因此尚不清楚它们如何在发展过程中对决策产生不同的影响。在这里，儿童、青少年和成年人（8-27 岁，n=122）完成了最近开发的一种价值引导决策任务的改编版，该任务将新奇性和不确定性分离开来。与之前的研究一致，我们发现探索行为随着年龄的增长而减少。至关重要的是，所有年龄段的参与者都表现出相似的偏好，即选择具有更大新奇性的选择选项，而对奖励不确定性的厌恶则在成年后增加。对参与者选择的计算模型表明，青少年和成年人对更具新颖性的选择选项的不确定性厌恶程度减弱，而儿童的选择不受奖励不确定性的影响。
