Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Strategic Organization Design group, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
Nat Commun. 2024 Sep 4;15(1):7721. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-51685-z.
Given the ubiquity of exploration in everyday life, researchers from many disciplines have developed methods to measure exploratory behaviour. There are therefore many ways to quantify and measure exploration. However, it remains unclear whether the different measures (i) have convergent validity relative to one another, (ii) capture a domain general tendency, and (iii) capture a tendency that is stable across time. In a sample of 678 participants, we found very little evidence of convergent validity for the behavioural measures (Hypothesis 1); most of the behavioural measures lacked sufficient convergent validity with one another or with the self-reports. In psychometric modelling analyses, we could not identify a good fitting model with an assumed general tendency to explore (Hypothesis 2); the best fitting model suggested that the different behavioural measures capture behaviours that are specific to the tasks. In a subsample of 254 participants who completed the study a second time, we found that the measures had stability across an 1 month timespan (Hypothesis 3). Therefore, although there were stable individual differences in how people approached each task across time, there was no generalizability across tasks, and drawing broad conclusions about exploratory behaviour from studies using these tasks may be problematic. The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 2nd December 2022 https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21717407.v1 . The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/64QJU .
鉴于探索在日常生活中的普遍存在，许多学科的研究人员已经开发出方法来衡量探索行为。因此，有很多方法可以对探索进行量化和测量。然而，目前还不清楚这些不同的测量方法是否（i）彼此之间具有收敛效度，（ii）捕捉到一般的领域倾向，以及（iii）在时间上是否具有稳定性。在 678 名参与者的样本中，我们发现行为测量之间几乎没有收敛效度的证据（假设 1）；大多数行为测量彼此之间或与自我报告之间缺乏足够的收敛效度。在心理测量模型分析中，我们无法确定具有假设的探索一般倾向的良好拟合模型（假设 2）；最佳拟合模型表明，不同的行为测量捕捉到特定于任务的行为。在第二次完成研究的 254 名参与者的子样本中，我们发现这些测量在 1 个月的时间跨度内具有稳定性（假设 3）。因此，尽管人们在不同时间对每个任务的处理方式存在稳定的个体差异，但任务之间没有可推广性，并且从使用这些任务的研究中得出关于探索性行为的广泛结论可能存在问题。本注册报告的第 1 阶段方案于 2022 年 12 月 2 日原则上被接受，网址为 https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21717407.v1 。该方案在被期刊接受后可在 https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/64QJU 网址中找到。
