ArticleCognition2021
Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly.
Article in Cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Indecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settings.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Autistic children sample costly information with increased variability due to inflexible updating.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Active information sampling in health and disease.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
- Probing apathy in children and adolescents with the Apathy Motivation Index-Child version.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Boosting Serotonin Increases Information Gathering by Reducing Subjective Cognitive Costs.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Error monitoring when no errors are possible: Arbitrary free-choice decisions invoke error monitoring processes.iScience · 2023Article
- Environmental uncertainty and the advantage of impulsive choice strategies.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- The promise of a model-based psychiatry: building computational models of mental ill health.The Lancet. Digital health · 2022Review
- Exploration heuristics decrease during youth.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Children are full of optimism, but those rose-tinted glasses are fading-Reduced learning from negative outcomes drives hyperoptimism in children.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2022Article
- Uncertainty about others' trustworthiness increases during adolescence and guides social information sampling.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- I know better! Emerging metacognition allows adolescents to ignore false advice.Developmental science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Humans often face decisions where little is known about the choice options. Gathering information prior to making a choice is an important strategy to improve decision making under uncertainty. This is of particular importance during childhood and adolescence, when knowledge about the world is still limited. To examine how much information youths gather, we asked 107 children (8-9 years, N = 30), early (12-13 years, N = 41) and late adolescents (16-17 years, N = 36) to perform an information sampling task. We find that children gather significantly more information before making a decision compared to adolescents, but only if it does not come with explicit costs. Using computational modelling, we find that this is because children have reduced subjective costs for gathering information. Our findings thus demonstrate how children overcome their limited knowledge and neurocognitive constraints by deploying excessive information gathering, a developmental feature that could inform aberrant information gathering in psychiatric disorders.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.