Systematic exploration and uncertainty dominate young children's choices

Organisms need to constantly balance the competing demands of gathering information and using previously acquired information to obtain rewarding outcomes (i.e., the “exploration–exploitation” dilemma). Exploration is critical to obtain information to discover how the world works, which should be particularly important for young children. While studies have shown that young children explore in response to surprising events, little is known about how they balance exploration and exploitation across multiple decisions or about how this process changes with development. In this study, we compare decision‐making patterns of children and adults and evaluate the relative influences of reward seeking, random exploration, and systematic switching (which approximates uncertainty‐directed exploration). In a second experiment, we directly test the effect of uncertainty on children's choices. Influential models of decision‐making generally describe systematic exploration as a computationally refined capacity that relies on top‐down cognitive control. We demonstrate that (a) systematic patterns dominate young children's behavior (facilitating exploration), despite protracted development of cognitive control; and (b) that uncertainty plays a major, but complicated, role in determining children's choices. We conclude that while young children's immature top‐down control should hinder adult‐like systematic exploration, other mechanisms may pick up the slack, facilitating broad information gathering in a systematic fashion to build a foundation of knowledge for use later in life.