Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Explore-exploit decisions are often made without accurate awareness of one's own behavioral tendencies, limiting effective metacognitive regulation. Feedback has the potential to improve metacognitive calibration, but its effectiveness depends on its informative value. This study examined how encouraging and reflective feedback--differing in informative value--influence children's explore-exploit decisions, while also considering the role of feedback frequency. Results showed that high-frequency reflective feedback reduced children's exploration but led to higher reward performance, suggesting the development of more adaptive search strategies. In contrast, children exhibited a more exploratory search pattern under low-frequent reflective feedback. Although encouraging feedback provided relatively low informative value, both low- and high-frequency delivery sustained high exploration, potentially by fostering emotional safety. Overall, these findings offer practical implications for education, highlighting the importance of strategically balancing affective reassurance and metacognitive control to support children's effective learning and exploration.