Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works.Exploration should be particularly valuable for young children,who have little knowledge about the world. Theories ofdecision-making describe systematic exploration as beingprimarily sub-served by prefrontal cortex (PFC). Recentresearch suggests that systematic exploration predominates inyoung children’s choices, despite immature PFC, suggestingthat this systematic exploration may be driven by differentmechanisms. We hypothesize that young children’s tendencyto distribute attention widely promotes broad informationgathering, which in turn translates to exploratory choicebehavior, and that interrupting distributed attention allocationthrough bottom up attentional capture would also disruptsystematic exploration. We test this hypothesis using a simplechoice task in which saliency of the options was manipulated.Saliency disrupted systematic exploration. These resultssuggest that attentional mechanisms may drive systematicexploratory behavior, and may be part of a larger tendencytoward broad information gathering in young children.