Understanding how learning changes during human development has been one of the long-standing objectives of developmental science. Recently, advances in computational biology have demonstrated that humans display a bias when learning to navigate novel environments through rewards and punishments: they learn more from outcomes that confirm their expectations than from outcomes that disconfirm them. Here, we ask whether confirmatory learning is stable across development, or whether it might be attenuated in developmental stages in which exploration is beneficial, such as in adolescence. In a reinforcement learning (RL) task, 77 participants aged 11–32 years (four men, mean age = 16.26) attempted to maximize monetary rewards by repeatedly sampling different pairs of novel options, which varied in their reward/punishment probabilities. Mixed-effect models showed an age-related increase in accuracy as long as learning contingencies remained stable across trials, but less so when they reversed halfway through the trials. Age was also associated with a greater tendency to stay with an option that had just delivered a reward, more than to switch away from an option that had just delivered a punishment. At the computational level, a confirmation model provided increasingly better fit with age. This model showed that age differences are captured by decreases in noise or exploration, rather than in the magnitude of the confirmation bias. These findings provide new insights into how learning changes during development and could help better tailor learning environments to people of different ages.
Research Highlights
Reinforcement learning shows age-related improvement during adolescence, but more in stable learning environments compared with volatile learning environments.
People tend to stay with an option after a win more than they shift from an option after a loss, and this asymmetry increases with age during adolescence.
Computationally, these changes are captured by a developing confirmatory learning style, in which people learn more from outcomes that confirm rather than disconfirm their choices.
Age-related differences in confirmatory learning are explained by decreases in stochasticity, rather than changes in the magnitude of the confirmation bias.
A developmental association exists between colour preference and emerging colour term acquisition in young children. Colour preference might influence colour term acquisition by directing attention towards or away from a particular colour, making it more or less memorable. To investigate the role that colour preference may have in the acquisition of colour terms, experimental tasks of colour preference, discrimination, attention, memory, and new colour term learning, were given to three groups of participants (preschool children; primary school children; and adults). Each task utilized the same colour stimuli, which were four computer‐simulated colours, matched perceptually to four different Munsell chips, drawn from the same colour category. Three colours varied systematically from an anchor colour (10PB 4/8) only in saturation (10PB 4/4), luminance (10PB 6/8), or hue (5P 4/8). Results showed that within‐category colour preferences emerged with age, and that when established within individuals, most preferred colours were named significantly more accurately than least preferred colours, although this association did not appear to be mediated directly by attention or memory. Rather, perceptual saliency was shown to have a mediating role, to some extent, in determining the relationship between colour preference and the cognitive processing of colour. 相似文献
An empirical research study based upon the expectancy–value model of Eccles and colleagues (1983) investigated the effect of gender-role orientations on psychological dimensions of female athletes' sport participation and the likelihood of their continued participation in a stereotypical masculine activity. The model ( Eccles et al., 1983 ) posits that gender-role orientation is linked to the intention to persist or discontinue sport participation, which is acted upon indirectly through mediation by two motivational variables: an individual's perceived competence and the perceived value of the activity. Three models were compared to test this mediation hypothesis with 333 female adolescent handball players in a prospective study. Results from structural equation modeling showed that a fully mediated model fit the data. The masculinity orientation positively predicted value for and perceived competence in handball, whereas the femininity orientation negatively predicted perceived competence. In addition, the two motivational variables negatively predicted intention to drop out. Finally, such intentions are the more proximal predictors of actual dropout. 相似文献
Objective: Advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is common, deadly, and associated with impairing anxiety for patients and caregivers who often co-experience similar symptoms that can vary together over time. We aimed to discover themes as to how NSCLC patients and caregivers express and cope with anxiety.
Design: Semi-structured interviews of patient-caregiver dyads (N?=?21), coded using NVivo Software.
Main Outcome Measures: Open-ended questions on anxiety mutuality, giving or receiving care, communication, and the most difficult aspects of having or caring for someone with Stage IV NSCLC.
Results: Analyses revealed that patients and caregivers were linked psychologically, co-experiencing symptoms of distress or coping, rising and falling together. Shared patient and caregiver themes emerged of cognitive, behavioural and physiological manifestations of anxiety and coping mechanisms.
Conclusions: Patient and caregiver expressions of anxiety and coping methods mapped onto the cognitive-behavioural model, implying potential use of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to address these issues. This expands understanding of symptoms and coping strategies in NSCLC, explores patient-caregiver interaction, and confirms the need for future clinical intervention. Future research should focus on development and dissemination of CBT-based dyadic interventions addressing anxiety in NSCLC patients and caregivers. 相似文献