We investigated how repeated choices develop in early childhood when outcome probabilities are known. Integrating previous findings from children’s causal learning and adults’ repeated choice behavior, we expected young children to probability match in a descriptive repeated choice paradigm and predicted that the perceived dependency between choices shapes the underlying sampling process. We recruited 201 children between 3 and 7 years and 100 adults to participate in a child-friendly guessing game with known outcome probabilities. We found that children across all age groups broadly diversified choices and that alternation dominated older children’s choice behavior. We did not, however, replicate the findings that inspired this research. We discuss implications for studying a description–experience gap in repeated risky choice across development.

What is the developmental trajectory of probability learning in early childhood, and how do changes in choice behavior relate to changes in executive functions? We conducted a two-year longitudinal study with children between the ages of 3.5 and 6.5 years and complemented behavioral analyses with computational modeling to illuminate underlying cognitive processes. On average, children became more likely to choose the high-probability option as they grew older and increasingly diversified choices in line with probability matching by T3. Moreover, younger children in the cohort were more likely to maximize probability than older children. Our analyses suggest that increasing choice diversification across childhood may relate to improving executive functions and value-based learning, whereas probability maximizing may serve as an easily implementable satisficing strategy. Finally, our findings emphasize how children's variability in choice behavior may affect the estimated direction of change and highlight the need for longitudinal research.

How does experiencing a rare event, like a car accident or a lottery win, influence decision-makers consecutive decisions? Studying these so-called recency effects holds a long tradition in research on experience-based decision-making. Previous work suggests opposite behavioral patterns after experiencing a positive rare event: People have been found to be more likely to either repeat their choice (positive recency) or to avoid it (negative recency). The effect is thought to persevere for multiple choices and decrease over time. In this study, we provide new insights into recency effects by analyzing people's repeated choices from an extensive database—consisting of 3 million choices by 8,000 participants across 12 different decision-from-experience paradigms collected from 139 studies. We provide a conceptual framework clarifying patterns of positive and negative recency, including how the direction and magnitude of impact change over time.