ArticleDevelopmental science2025
Perceptual Novelty Drives Early Exploration in a Bottom-Up Manner.
Article in Developmental science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Drivers of exploration early in development: Perceptual novelty rather than a quest for information.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- External incentives change the relation between confidence and epistemic curiosity.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Working memory shapes information sampling and attention allocation across development.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
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
Children are more likely than adults to explore new options, but is this due to a top-down epistemic-uncertainty-driven process or a bottom-up novelty-driven process? Given immature cognitive control, children may choose a new option because they are more susceptible to the automatic attraction of perceptual novelty and have difficulty disengaging from it. This hypothesis is difficult to test because perceptual novelty is intertwined with epistemic uncertainty. To address this problem, we designed a new n-armed bandit task to fully decouple novelty and epistemic uncertainty. By having adults and 4- to 6-year-olds perform the task, we found that perceptual novelty predominated 4-year-olds' (but not adults' or older children's) decisions even when it had no epistemic uncertainty and had the lowest reward value. Additionally, 4-year-olds showed such a novelty preference only when the option's novelty was directly observable, but not when it could only be anticipated, providing new evidence that perceptual novelty alone can drive elevated exploration in early development in a bottom-up manner.
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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.