Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current study investigates how children act on a standardexploreexploit bandit task relative to adults. In Experiment 1,we used childfriendly versions of the bandit task and foundthat children did not play in a way that maximized payout.However, children were able to identify the machines thathad the highest level of payout and overwhelmingly preferredit. We also show that children’s exploration is not random. Forexample, children selected the bandits from left to rightmultiple times. In Experiment 2, we had adults complete thetask in Experiment 1 with different sets of instructions. Whentold to maximize learning, adults explored the task in muchthe same way that children did. Together, these results suggestthat children are more interested in exploring than exploiting,and a potential explanation for this is that children are tryingto learn as much about the environment as they can.