Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is a well-known finding that adults are “cognitive misers,” in that they optimize performance by reducing effortwhenever possible. We examined how this tendency emerges in the course of development. We incentivized participantsto acquire as many points for correct responses as possible, and allowed them to choose between two games of differentialdifficulty on every trial. Whereas adults systematically chose the easier of the two games, 5-year-olds did not. However, whenwe gave children feedback on the basis of their choice rather than accuracy, they exhibited evidence of optimization by selectingthe easier game. Further, they showed the same pattern when the two games were modified to be identical in difficulty, withonly feedback supporting the choice of one game over the other. These findings suggest that children may be cognitive misers,but they rely on external feedback rather than internal signals of effort to optimize their behavior.