Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, United States.
Cogn Psychol. 2024 May;150:101650. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2024.101650. Epub 2024 Mar 10.
A critical component of human learning reflects the balance people must achieve between focusing on the utility of what they know versus openness to what they have yet to experience. How individuals decide whether to explore new options versus exploit known options has garnered growing interest in recent years. Yet, the component processes underlying decisions to explore and whether these processes change across development remain poorly understood. By contrasting a variety of tasks that measure exploration in slightly different ways, we found that decisions about whether to explore reflect (a) random exploration that is not explicitly goal-directed and (b) directed exploration to purposefully reduce uncertainty. While these components similarly characterized the decision-making of both youth and adults, younger participants made decisions that were less strategic, but more exploratory and flexible, than those of adults. These findings are discussed in terms of how people adapt to and learn from changing environments over time.Data has been made available in the Open Science Foundation platform (osf.io).
人类学习的一个关键组成部分反映了人们必须在关注自己所知道的事物的实用性与对自己尚未经历的事物的开放性之间取得平衡。近年来，人们越来越关注个人决定是探索新选择还是利用已知选择，以及这些选择背后的成分过程。然而，探索决策的基础过程以及这些过程是否会随着发展而变化仍知之甚少。通过对比各种以略有不同的方式衡量探索的任务，我们发现，是否探索的决策反映了 (a) 没有明确目标导向的随机探索，以及 (b) 有目的减少不确定性的定向探索。虽然这些成分同样描述了年轻人和成年人的决策过程，但年轻参与者的决策比成年人的决策更具策略性，但更具探索性和灵活性。这些发现是根据人们如何随着时间的推移适应和从不断变化的环境中学习来讨论的。数据已经在开放科学基金会平台（osf.io）上提供。
