Tracking changes in exploratory behaviour across development

Bounia-Mastrogianni, Pinelopi Panagiota (2024) Tracking changes in exploratory behaviour across development. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

There is vast empirical evidence that childhood is a period of increased curiosity for the world and broad exploration. This exploratory behaviour is manifested both as directed information to resolve uncertainty in the environment, as well as novelty seeking. It has been proposed that both exploratory tendencies gradually become narrower as adulthood is reached, giving space to more exploitative, goal-directed behaviour. However, findings have been contradictory so far, and the exact balance between exploration and exploitation, as well as between exploratory behaviours across development have yet to be clarified. Substantial part of this thesis focuses on the real-time conflict between these options when people are interacting with the world, and how this might change with cognitive control maturation. We are approaching this first by employing hand kinematics analyses in a decision-making task. A second part of this thesis focuses on information in the physical world, and how the available amount of information might influence object manipulation and exploratory behaviour, specifically when varying object complexity. Our results in indicate that children compared to the other groups, specifically when cognitive constraints are applied by the decision context or by individual level of executive functioning skills analyses of kinematic parameters captured meaningful decision-making processes. We also showed that object complexity differentially affects preschoolers’ interest and explicit preferences, especially in the visual domain. Object complexity also significantly affected young children’s still-developing object fitting skills, leading them to use their hands as attentional anchors in the environment. In conclusion, this thesis shows that humans track informational changes with their perception and action since a very early age (3 years old) and assign value to this information in different ways as they grow older, based on their cognitive control maturation, their individual preferences and their contextual or long-term goals.

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