Papers

Children gather more information when it is not costly

In our recent paper, we are investigating how information gathering changes over childhood and adolescence. We found that children gathered substantially more information before making a decision, but only if it came at no extra costs for sampling information. Using further computational modelling we showed that this effect was driven by a later emergence of subjective sampling costs for gathering information. These findings help us to understand how such cognitive functions develop, and how different information gathering impairments arise in adolescence-related psychiatric disorders. 

More information can be found here:
Bowler AHabicht J, Moses-Payne ME, Steinbeis N, Moutoussis M & Hauser TU (2021). Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly. Cognition 104535