Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 208; p. 104535
• Main Authors: Bowler, Aislinn, Habicht, Johanna, Moses-Payne, Madeleine E., Steinbeis, Niko, Moutoussis, Michael, Hauser, Tobias U.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01-03-2021; Elsevier Science Ltd; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adolescents; Child; Childhood; Children; Cognition; Cognitive development; Computational modelling; Computational neuroscience; Decision Making; Humans; Information gathering; Mental disorders; Uncertainty; Information gathering; Computational modelling; Cognitive development
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104535

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.