Human cognition is distinguished by our ability to adapt to different environments and circumstances. Yet the mechanisms driving adaptive behavior have predominantly been studied in separate asocial and social contexts, with an integrated framework …
Generalization, defined as applying limited experiences to novel situations, represents a cornerstone of human intelligence. Our review traces the evolution and continuity of psychological theories of generalization, from origins in concept learning …
Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an …
There is a resurgence of interest in "cognitive maps" based on recent evidence that the hippocampal-entorhinal system encodes both spatial and non-spatial information, with far-reaching implications for human behavior. Yet little is known about the …
How do children and adults differ in their search for rewards? We considered three different hypotheses that attribute developmental differences to (a) children's increased random sampling, (b) more directed exploration toward uncertain options, or …
From foraging for food to learning complex games, many aspects of human behaviour can be framed as a search problem with a vast space of possible actions. Under finite search horizons, optimal solutions are generally unobtainable. Yet, how do humans …
We introduce the spatially correlated multi-armed bandit as a task coupling function learning with the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Participants interacted with bi-variate reward functions on a two-dimensional grid, with the goal of either …