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Poster B37 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Development of structure inference contributes to age-related differences in exploration
Nora C. Harhen1 (), Catherine A. Hartley2, Aaron M. Bornstein1; 1University of California, Irvine, 2New York University
How we represent an environment's structure influences how we explore it. Here, we asked whether developmental differences in structure learning contribute to known age-related differences in exploration. Participants between ages 8 and 25 completed a patch foraging task previously shown in adults to elicit individual differences in structure inference. We compared their behavior to the predictions of a Bayesian structure learning model. We found that, consistent with normative models, all participants were able to adapt their exploration with respect to their uncertainty about the environment's structure. However, we found that older participants overharvested more when it was more profitable, consistent with their representing the patch structure in a more complex, but ultimately veridical, fashion, compared to younger participants. These results suggest a role for changes in representation in underlying the developmental shift away from exploration towards exploitation.
Keywords: foraging exploration structure learning development