Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adolescence is marked by increased risky decisions. Making better decisions typically requires obtaining more informa-tion relevant to that decision. Adolescents may be especially tolerant of uncertainty when making decisions or averseto the effort needed to obtain more information. We had adolescents and adults complete an effort-based informationsampling task, in which participants could sample information until deciding that the evidence obtained was sufficientfor responding. Effort was manipulated by varying the number of mouse clicks required to sample information acrosstrials. Surprisingly, adolescents sampled more than adults prior to responding at low effort and continued to sample moreeven as effort requirements increased. Computational modeling indicated that adolescents and adults used simple heuris-tics to decide between sampling more or responding but that adolescents sought a higher evidence threshold than adults.Adolescents may seek more information and be less averse to effort costs in information sampling compared with adults.