ArticleNature human behaviour2023
Developmental changes in exploration resemble stochastic optimization.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dopamine depletion in Parkinson's increases directed but not random exploration.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- The Axon as a Self-Modifying Computational System: Autonomous Inference, Adaptive Propagation, and AI-Enabled Mechanistic Insight.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Working memory shapes information sampling and attention allocation across development.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Children Understand How Adults' Achievement Goals Drive Actions.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Novelty as a drive of human exploration in complex stochastic environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Different exploration strategies along the autism spectrum: diverging effects of autism diagnosis and autism traits.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Article
- Internal uncertainty impacts social information use in risky choice across adolescence.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Social learning leads to inflexible strategy use in children across three societies.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Stochastic decisions support optimal foraging of volatile environments, and are disrupted by anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Perceptual Novelty Drives Early Exploration in a Bottom-Up Manner.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning increasingly relates to memory specificity from childhood to adulthood.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Curiosity across the adult lifespan: Age-related differences in state and trait curiosity.PloS one · 2025Article
- A framework for uniting space and time in the mind and brain.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Article
- Decrease in decision noise from adolescence into adulthood mediates an increase in more sophisticated choice behaviors and performance gain.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Humans flexibly integrate social information despite interindividual differences in reward.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Human development is often described as a 'cooling off' process, analogous to stochastic optimization algorithms that implement a gradual reduction in randomness over time. Yet there is ambiguity in how to interpret this analogy, due to a lack of concrete empirical comparisons. Using data from n = 281 participants ages 5 to 55, we show that cooling off does not only apply to the single dimension of randomness. Rather, human development resembles an optimization process of multiple learning parameters, for example, reward generalization, uncertainty-directed exploration and random temperature. Rapid changes in parameters occur during childhood, but these changes plateau and converge to efficient values in adulthood. We show that while the developmental trajectory of human parameters is strikingly similar to several stochastic optimization algorithms, there are important differences in convergence. None of the optimization algorithms tested were able to discover reliably better regions of the strategy space than adult participants on this task.
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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.