The Development of Risk Preferences and Exploration Strategies in Human Children and Chimpanzees

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Human and nonhuman animals frequently have only incomplete knowledge about their environment and of the consequences of their decisions and actions. Different developmental periods may be associated with distinct decision making, exploration and learning strategies to solve this adaptive challenge. In the symposium, researchers from three international labs, apply diverse methods to investigate the development of risk preferences and exploration strategies across different populations and age groups.
The first presentation uses an innovative and child-friendly approach to study the development of risky choices and the underlying cognitive strategies and reveals that preschoolers who strategically gamble, tend to be risk seeking and do not systematically use expected values to guide their choices. The second presentation uses a combination of behavioral analyses and computational models to examine how learning and exploration evolve over the lifespan, extending the existing hypothesis that young children are more prone to random exploration. The third presentation investigates the development of risk preferences and exploration strategies in one of human’s closest living relatives, chimpanzees, and demonstrates that across different domains the lifespan trajectories show important similarities to well established findings in humans.
Collectively, this symposium presents an interdisciplinary and evolutionary approach on the development of risk preferences and exploration strategies. Our discussant, will provide an integrative synthesis in light of human life history and discuss how these findings relate to explore–exploit tensions.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Lou M. Haux, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Discussant

• Alison Gopnik, University of California - Berkeley

Individual Presentations

• Preschoolers Differ in How They Approach Risky Decisions - Presenting Author: Emily Sarah Sumner, University of California - Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Michael Lee, University of California, Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Barbara W Sarnecka, University of California - Irvine

• Exploration and Generalization Over the Lifespan - Presenting Author: Charley M Wu, University of Tübingen; Non-Presenting Author: Anna Giron, University of Tübingen; Non-Presenting Author: Eric Schulz, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics; Non-Presenting Author: Björn Meder, Health and Medical University Potsdam; Non-Presenting Author: Azzurra Ruggeri, Max-Planck Institute for Human Development; Non-Presenting Author: Simon Ciranka, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Non-Presenting Author: Wouter Van den Bos, University of Amsterdam

• The Development of Risk Preferences in Chimpanzees - Presenting Author: Lou M. Haux, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Non-Presenting Author: Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Ruben Arslan, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Non-Presenting Author: Ralph Hertwig, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Non-Presenting Author: Esther Herrmann, University of Portsmouth