The strategies people use for exploration change during the transition from teen to young adult, research suggests.
Young adults are more likely to engage in “directed exploration,” or exploration driven by information-seeking, than teenagers are. At the same time, teens seem to be more comfortable with uncertainty overall.
The study differentiates between two distinct types of exploration: directed and random. An example of “directed exploration” might be going to Google or Wikipedia to get an answer to a specific question, while an example of “random exploration” might be clicking on random articles in Wikipedia without an end goal in mind, explains Robert Wilson, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science in the University of Arizona psychology department.
“There are two types of exploration, and people use both of them,” Wilson says. “Directed exploration is really focused on finding information. Random exploration is much less goal-driven, but it’s an equally good way of exploring the world.”
Slot-machine experiment
In a study of 149 adolescents and young adults, ranging in age from 12 to 28, participants were asked to complete a computer-based “slot machine” task designed by Wilson to evaluate exploratory strategies. Asked to achieve the highest score possible, participants saw two on-screen “slot machines” with varying levels of information about each machine’s previous outputs and the number of chances they would be given to play—either one or six. They then had to choose which machine to play.
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When given just one chance to play, adolescents and young adults similarly exploited the high-reward option, or the machine with the best track record of outputs, based on the information given. However, when given six chances to play—and shown one machine in which only one previous output was known and one machine in which three previous outputs were known and all were in a similar numerical range—older participants were more likely than younger participants to play the machine with only one known output, in an effort to get more information about its performance. In other words, they were more likely to engage in directed exploration.
“Teenagers had much lower levels of directed exploration, so they were less strategically information-seeking,” Wilson says. “It seems there’s an increase in directed exploration between the ages of 12 and 18, and then it sort of flattens off.
“Teenagers make up for this lack of strategic exploration with an overall bias toward more uncertain options. They’re more willing to choose an uncertain option than the slightly older participants are.”
Rewards now or rewards later?
The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, contribute to researchers’ understanding of adolescent decision-making, says Leah Somerville, associate professor of psychology at Harvard University, co-lead author of the study and director of Harvard’s Affective Neuroscience & Development Lab.
“One of the lessons from this study is that there are strategies adults use to gather information that seem to be ‘tuned’ a little differently in adolescents,” she says. “Adults consider the long-term consequences of gathering information—even when it means giving up a good option in the short term.
“Adolescents are less willing to give up those short-term rewards to gather information that might be useful in the future. The fact that adolescents are ‘taken away’ from future-oriented decisions when short-term rewards are on the line could be relevant to the real-world decisions that adolescents make.”
It’s not a flaw
It’s important to note, Somerville says, that participants achieved generally the same results in the study task regardless of which exploration strategy they used, so one strategy should not necessarily be touted as better than the other.
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“Often, adolescents are painted as having ‘faulty’ decision-making. These findings challenge that claim, instead suggesting that adolescents’ decisions are ‘tuned’ to value different kinds of information,” she says. “Whether this tuning helps or hurts them depends on the type of decision being made, but we should not assume that adolescents’ decisions are worse by default.”
As to why the two age groups have different exploration strategies, more research is needed, but one theory is that it has something to do with the way the brain physically develops during that phase of life, Wilson says.
“The idea of strategically deploying exploration in situations where you need it is a fairly sophisticated decision process, so one thought may be that this is related to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which we know develops through adolescence,” Wilson says. “That’s maybe the neuroanatomy story, but we have no direct evidence for that in this paper.”
Source: University of Arizona
