Psychological Science 2022

Shuffle the Decks: Children Are Sensitive to Incidental Nonrandom Structure in a Sequential-Choice Task

Alexander D. S. Breslav¹; Nancy Zucker^2,3; Julia C. Schechter^2,3; Alesha Majors^2,3; Tatyana Bidopia^2,3; Bernard F. Fuemmeler⁴; Scott H. Kollins^2,3; Scott A. Huettel¹

¹ Duke University · ² Duke Medical Center · ³ Duke University Hospital · ⁴ Virginia Commonwealth University

Abstract

As children age, they can learn increasingly complex features of environmental structure—a key prerequisite for adaptive decision-making. Yet when we tested children ( N = 304, 4–13 years old) in the Children’s Gambling Task, an age-appropriate variant of the Iowa Gambling Task, we found that age was negatively associated with performance. However, this paradoxical effect of age was found only in children who exhibited a maladaptive deplete-replenish bias, a tendency to shift choices after positive outcomes and repeat choices after negative outcomes. We found that this bias results from sensitivity to incidental nonrandom structure in the canonical, deterministic forms of these tasks—and that it would actually lead to optimal outcomes if the tasks were not deterministic. Our results illustrate that changes in decision-making across early childhood reflect, in part, increasing sensitivity to environmental structure.

DOI

10.1177/09567976211042007

Sources

openalex

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APA 7 MLA 9 Chicago (author–date) Harvard Elsevier Harvard (JFE, JBF…) The Accounting Review Academy of Management American Marketing Association INFORMS (Management Science) Copy citation Copied ✓