Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularly valuable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision-making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children's choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children's tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children's systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.

探索对于发现世界如何运作至关重要。对于对世界知之甚少的幼儿来说，探索应该特别有价值。决策理论将系统探索描述为主要由自上而下的认知控制驱动，这在幼儿中是不成熟的。最近的研究表明，尽管控制不成熟，但一种系统性探索在幼儿的选择中占主导地位，这表明它可能是由不同的机制驱动的。我们假设幼儿广泛分布注意力的倾向促进了探索的提升，并且通过自下而上的注意力捕获中断分布式注意力分配也会破坏系统性探索。我们通过在一个简单的选择任务中操纵选项的显着性来检验这个假设。显着性破坏了系统探索，从而表明注意力机制可能会驱动儿童的系统探索行为。我们认为，两者都可能是幼儿广泛收集信息的更大趋势的一部分。