Human development is often described as a “cooling off” process, analogous to stochastic optimization algorithms that implement a gradual reduction in randomness over time. Yet there is ambiguity in how to interpret this analogy, due to a lack of …
Searching for information in a goal-directed manner is central for learning, diagnosis, and prediction. Children continuously ask questions to learn new concepts, doctors do medical tests to diagnose their patients, and scientists perform experiments …
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 people actively learn functional rules, i.e. a mapping of continuous inputs onto a continuous output? We investigate information search behavior in a multiple-feature function learning task in which participants either actively select or …
How do children and adults search for information when stepwise-optimal strategies fail to identify the most efficient query? The value of questions is often measured in terms of stepwise information gain (expected reduction of entropy on the next …
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 …
How do people actively explore to learn about functional relationships, that is, how continuous inputs map onto continuous outputs? We introduce a novel paradigm to investigate information search in continuous, multi-feature function learning …
The idea of a "cognitive map" was originally developed to explain planning and generalization in spatial domains through a representation of inferred relationships between experiences. Recently, new research has suggested similar principles may also …
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 …