Gao Mengcun, Sloutsky Vladimir M
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Dev Sci. 2025 May;28(3):e70002. doi: 10.1111/desc.70002.
Children are more likely than adults to explore new options, but is this due to a top-down epistemic-uncertainty-driven process or a bottom-up novelty-driven process? Given immature cognitive control, children may choose a new option because they are more susceptible to the automatic attraction of perceptual novelty and have difficulty disengaging from it. This hypothesis is difficult to test because perceptual novelty is intertwined with epistemic uncertainty. To address this problem, we designed a new n-armed bandit task to fully decouple novelty and epistemic uncertainty. By having adults and 4- to 6-year-olds perform the task, we found that perceptual novelty predominated 4-year-olds' (but not adults' or older children's) decisions even when it had no epistemic uncertainty and had the lowest reward value. Additionally, 4-year-olds showed such a novelty preference only when the option's novelty was directly observable, but not when it could only be anticipated, providing new evidence that perceptual novelty alone can drive elevated exploration in early development in a bottom-up manner.
儿童比成年人更有可能探索新的选择，但这是由于自上而下的认知不确定性驱动的过程，还是自下而上的新奇性驱动的过程呢？鉴于儿童的认知控制尚未成熟，他们可能会选择新的选项，因为他们更容易受到感知新奇性的自动吸引，并且难以从中摆脱出来。这一假设很难进行测试，因为感知新奇性与认知不确定性相互交织。为了解决这个问题，我们设计了一种新的n臂老虎机任务，以完全分离新奇性和认知不确定性。通过让成年人以及4至6岁的儿童执行该任务，我们发现，即使感知新奇性没有认知不确定性且奖励价值最低，它在4岁儿童（而非成年人或年龄较大儿童）的决策中仍占主导地位。此外，4岁儿童只有在选项的新奇性可以直接观察到时才会表现出这种新奇性偏好，而当新奇性只能被预期时则不会，这提供了新的证据，表明仅感知新奇性就能以自下而上的方式推动早期发育中更高水平的探索。
