I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore–exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several lines of empirical evidence suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.

中文翻译：

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童年是探索和利用紧张局势的解决方案

我认为，我们生命史的进化，以及其独特的漫长、受保护的人类童年，允许在目标导向的开发需求出现之前进行广泛的假设搜索和探索的早期阶段。这种认知特征也存在于其他动物中并且与新恋情和玩耍等早期行为有关。我将这种发展模式与探索-利用权衡、搜索和采样的计算思想以及神经科学发现联系起来。我还提出了几条经验证据，表明年轻的人类学习者无论是在搜索外部信息还是在假设空间中搜索方面都具有高度的探索性。事实上，他们有时比年长的学习者和成年人更具探索性。本文是主题“生命史与学习：童年、看护和老年如何塑造人类和其他动物的认知和文化”的一部分。