Main content
The Exploration Advantage: Children’s instinct to explore allows them to find information that adults miss.
Date created: 2019-02-05 11:48 PM | Last Updated: 2020-03-31 04:18 PM
Category: Project
Description: Humans have a long childhood in comparison to all other species. Across disciplines, researchers agree that humans’ prolonged immaturity is integral to our unique intelligence. The studies presented here support the hypothesis that human beings’ extended childhood pays off in the form of an ability to learn more about changing environments. Across two studies (n = 213), children and adults played a game where they chose among four different cartoon monsters yielding different numbers of star rewards. Adults focused on maximizing reward, while children chose to explore longer, even at the cost of earning fewer stars. As a result, adults won significantly more stars than children did. However, in the ‘dynamic’ version of the task, the rewards given out by the monsters changed halfway through: the monster that had been giving out the fewest stars began giving out the most. Because children continued to explore whereas adults ignored the low-reward monster, children were much more likely than adults to detect the change. This illustrates that while exploration may be costly in the short term, it leads to a more flexible understanding of the world in the long term, particularly when that world is changing.
Files
Files can now be accessed and managed under the Files tab.
Citation
Components
Pre-Registrations
Links to our pre-registrations can be found in this component
Procedure
The script that we used and illustrations of our task can be found in this component
Materials
This component contains the printable materials that our team of research assistants would use during testing to take notes and stay organized.
Experiment Code
This component contains the experiment code for studies 1 and 2 of the project "The Exploration Advantage". Adults and children are given the same tas...
Data
All of our data and demographic information can be found in this component.
Code for Analysis and Data Cleaning
Our R code for data cleaning and analysis can be found in this component.
Supplemental Methods and Analysis
PDF versions of the Supplemental Method and Analysis section can be found here
IRB Documentation
All of our IRB documentation is in this component.
Recent Activity
Unable to retrieve logs at this time. Please refresh the page or contact support@osf.io if the problem persists.
Start managing your projects on the OSF today.
Free and easy to use, the Open Science Framework supports the entire research lifecycle: planning, execution, reporting, archiving, and discovery.