Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children are drivers of their own discovery. To develop a complete characterization of the factors that drive explo-ration in early childhood, we must first understand how competing factors influence children’s decision making. We investigatedpreschool-aged children’s decision-making on explore-exploit tasks where the available information about the distribution ofrewards was controlled. When probability information is unknown, children preferred to exploit known rewards over exploringunknown ones. However, performance in Experiment 2 shows that children can use probabilistic information to form accurateexpectations about possible outcomes to effectively choose between exploiting and exploring. The degree to which individ-ual children are “exploratory” is also shown to be consistent over weeks, suggesting that individual children have “trait-like”exploratory drives. On aggregate, children incorporate these individual tendencies towards exploration or exploitation withprobability information; thus children readily form estimations of expected reward and use this information to guide efficientexploratory behavior.