How do children and adults differ in their search for rewards? We considered three different hypotheses that attribute developmental differences to (a) children’s increased random sampling, (b) more directed exploration toward uncertain options, or (c) narrower generalization. Using a search task in which noisy rewards were spatially correlated on a grid, we compared the ability of 55 younger children (ages 7 and 8 years), 55 older children (ages 9–11 years), and 50 adults (ages 19–55 years) to successfully generalize about unobserved outcomes and balance the exploration–exploitation dilemma. Our results show that children explore more eagerly than adults but obtain lower rewards. We built a predictive model of search to disentangle the unique contributions of the three hypotheses of developmental differences and found robust and recoverable parameter estimates indicating that children generalize less and rely on directed exploration more than adults. We did not, however, find reliable differences in terms of random sampling.

中文翻译：

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像孩子一样寻找奖励意味着更少的概括和更直接的探索

儿童和成人在寻求奖励方面有何不同？我们考虑了三种不同的假设，这些假设将发展差异归因于 (a) 儿童增加随机抽样，(b) 对不确定选项进行更直接的探索，或 (c) 概括范围更窄。使用搜索任务，其中噪声奖励在网格上空间相关，我们比较了 55 名年幼儿童（7 岁和 8 岁）、55 名年长儿童（9-11 岁）和 50 名成人（19-55 岁）的能力年）成功地概括了未观察到的结果并平衡了探索 - 开发困境。我们的研究结果表明，儿童比成人更热衷于探索，但获得的奖励较低。我们建立了一个搜索预测模型来解开三个发展差异假设的独特贡献，并发现稳健且可恢复的参数估计表明，与成人相比，儿童概括较少，更依赖于定向探索。然而，我们没有发现随机抽样方面的可靠差异。