ArticleChild development
Exploration, exploitation, and development: Developmental shifts in decision-making.
Article in Child development. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Working memory, exploration, and cognitive development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Drivers of exploration early in development: Perceptual novelty rather than a quest for information.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- How Uncertainty Affects Children's Exploration and Exploitation in Statistical Learning.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Infants and Mobiles: Developing an Understanding of Cause and Effect.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Working memory shapes information sampling and attention allocation across development.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- (IoT) Network intrusion detection system using optimization algorithms.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Exploration, Distributed Attention, and Development of Category Learning.Psychological science · 2024Article
- From Uncertainty to Performance Optimization: Longitudinal Insights Into Metacognitive Development.Child developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Decision-making requires balancing exploration with exploitation, yet children are highly exploratory, with exploration decreasing with development. Less is known about what drives these changes. We examined the development of decision-making in 188 three- to eight-year-old children (M = 64 months; 98 girls) and 26 adults (M = 19 years; 13 women). Children were recruited from ethnically diverse suburban middle-class neighborhoods of Columbus, Ohio, USA. Results indicate that mature reward-based choices emerge relatively late in development, with children tending to over-explore. Computational modeling suggests that this exploration is systematic rather than random, as children tend to avoid repeating choices made on the previous trial. This pattern of exploration (reminiscent of novelty preference) decreased with development, whereas the tendency to exploit increased.
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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.