Attentional mechanisms drive systematic exploration in young children

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.31234/osf.io/9vjmp ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Nathaniel J. Blanco ◽

Vladimir Sloutsky

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Young Children ◽

Information Gathering ◽

Choice Task ◽

Attention Allocation ◽

Top Down ◽

Distributed Attention ◽

Systematic Exploration ◽

The World ◽

Attentional Mechanisms

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularlyvaluable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision- making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children’s choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children’s tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children’s systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.

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Systematic Exploration and Uncertainty Dominate Young Children’s Choices

10.31234/osf.io/72sfx ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Nathaniel J. Blanco ◽

Vladimir Sloutsky

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Young Children ◽

Cognitive Control ◽

Exploration And Exploitation ◽

Top Down ◽

Reward Seeking ◽

Systematic Fashion ◽

Systematic Exploration ◽

Competing Demands ◽

Exploration Exploitation

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 (1) systematic patterns dominate young children’s behavior (facilitating exploration), despite protracted development of cognitive control, and (2) 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.

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Researching family food decision making processes: highlights, hits and pitfalls when including young children’s perspectives

Qualitative Market Research An International Journal ◽

10.1108/qmr-03-2019-0048 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽

Author(s):

Alice Grønhøj ◽

Malene Gram

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Young Children ◽

Video Clip ◽

Research Process ◽

Choice Task ◽

Sentence Completion ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Quality Of Data ◽

Content Type ◽

Desert Island

Purpose The aim of this paper is to demonstrate and discuss a number of child-centric research methods/stimuli involving young children (5-6 years old) in interviews without, and subsequently with their parents. Existing and new methods were selected and developed for a study which aimed at obtaining insights into parents’ and young children’s understandings of children’s influence and family interaction with regard to family food consumption practices. Design/methodology/approach A total of 35 children were interviewed using semi-structured interviews in five kindergartens. Subsequently, 13 families were interviewed in their homes. The latter interviews included the same children as were interviewed in the kindergarten. The methods discussed include drawings, a desert-island-choice task, a sentence completion task, photographs, vignettes and a video-clip. Findings When interviewing young children about family decision making influence, the use of engaging methods contributes to the quality of data achieved and to the participants’ enjoyment of their participation. Care should be taken not to overload children with exercises. Visual rather than verbal methods worked better for engaging the children in the research process; for parents all included methods worked well. Research limitations/implications The current study shows that a method developed specifically for the study (desert-island-choice task) was apt at including all family members’ perspectives; future studies should develop methods that capture shared rather than individual experiences. The study was carried out in wealthy areas in Denmark. It would be highly relevant to broaden the sample to other socio-economic and cultural contexts. Originality/value The study is based on interviews with children usually deemed too young to interview. The contribution is novel methods that allow for studying the interaction between children and parents and that are not based on reading and writing skills to access the perspectives of 5-6-year old children. Precautions regarding using existing methods are offered.

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Domestic dogs' gaze and behavior in 2-alternative choice tasks

10.31234/osf.io/pt3vh ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Julia Espinosa ◽

Daphna Buchsbaum

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Visual Discrimination ◽

Visual Information ◽

Choice Behavior ◽

Choice Task ◽

Domestic Dogs ◽

The World ◽

Alternative Choice ◽

And Behavior ◽

Choice Tasks

Species such as humans rely on their excellent visual abilities to perceive and navigate the world. Dogs have co-habited with humans for millennia, yet we know little about how they gather and use visual information to guide decision-making. Across five experiments, we presented pet dogs (N=49) with two foods of unequal value in a 2-alternative choice task, and measured whether dogs showed preferential gazing, and whether visual attention patterns were associated with item choice. Overall, dogs looked significantly longer at the preferred (high value) food over the low value alternative. There was also evidence of item-dependent predictive gaze—dogs looked proportionally longer at the item they subsequently chose. Surprisingly, dogs’ choice behavior was only slightly above chance, despite visual discrimination. These results suggest that dogs use visual information in the environment to inform their choice behavior, but that other factors may also contribute to their decision-making.

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