P.R. Jones
Efficient visual information sampling develops late in childhood
Jones, P.R.; Landin, L.; McLean, A.; Juni, M.Z.; Maloney, L.T.; Nardini, M.; Dekker, T.M.
Authors
L. Landin
A. McLean
M.Z. Juni
L.T. Maloney
Professor Marko Nardini marko.nardini@durham.ac.uk
Professor
T.M. Dekker
Abstract
It is often unclear which course of action gives the best outcome. We can reduce this uncertainty by gathering more information; but gathering information always comes at a cost. For example, a sports player waiting too long to judge a ball’s trajectory will run out of time to intercept it. Efficient samplers must therefore optimize a trade-off: when the costs of collecting further information exceed the expected benefits, they should stop sampling and start acting. In visually guided tasks, adults can make these trade-offs efficiently, correctly balancing any reductions in visuomotor uncertainty against cost factors associated with increased sampling. To investigate how this ability develops during childhood, we tested 6-11 year-olds, adolescents, and adults on a visual localization task in which the costs and benefits of sampling were formalized in a quantitative framework. This allowed us to compare participants to each other, and to an ideal observer who maximizes expected reward. Visual sampling became substantially more efficient between 6-11 years, converging onto adult performance in adolescence. Younger children systematically under-sampled information relative to the ideal observer and varied their sampling strategy more. Further analyses suggested that young children used a suboptimal decision rule that insufficiently accounted for the chance of task failure, in line with a late developing ability to compute with probabilities and costs. We therefore propose that late development of efficient information sampling, a crucial element of real-world decision-making under risk, may form an important component of sub-optimality in child perception, action, and decision-making.
Citation
Jones, P., Landin, L., McLean, A., Juni, M., Maloney, L., Nardini, M., & Dekker, T. (2019). Efficient visual information sampling develops late in childhood. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(7), 1138-1152. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000629
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Apr 22, 2019 |
Online Publication Date | Jul 1, 2019 |
Publication Date | Jul 31, 2019 |
Deposit Date | May 8, 2019 |
Publicly Available Date | May 9, 2019 |
Journal | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General |
Print ISSN | 0096-3445 |
Electronic ISSN | 1939-2222 |
Publisher | American Psychological Association |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 148 |
Issue | 7 |
Pages | 1138-1152 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000629 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1302043 |
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© 2019 APA, all rights reserved. This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.
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