ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 110 papers.
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Who cites it
110 citing papers in PubMed, 333 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Human Life History is Shaping Embodied Medicinal Plant Knowledge Across the Lifespan.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Reading fiction in early adolescence predicts the ability to imagine our own future.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Infants and Mobiles: Developing an Understanding of Cause and Effect.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Children use algorithm induction to discover patterns in data.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Convergent and divergent brain-cognition development in early adolescence.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Understanding the impact of misinformation on adolescents.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Understanding how adolescents engage in mindfulness-based intervention: a mixed methods study of engagement processes.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Computational Approaches Reveal Developmental Shifts in Exploratory Play.Developmental science · 2025Article
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- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Reversal learning is influenced by cognitive flexibility and develops throughout early adolescence.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Children engage neural reward structures for creative musical improvisation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Wild Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) Use Tools to Access Out of Reach Water.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Response: Commentary: Outlining a novel psychometric model of mental flexibility and affect dynamics.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Commentary: Outlining a novel psychometric model of mental flexibility and affect dynamics.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Transmission Versus Truth, Imitation Versus Innovation: What Children Can Do That Large Language and Language-and-Vision Models Cannot (Yet).Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Social experience in adolescence shapes prefrontal cortex structure and function in adulthood.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
50 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and adolescence allows a balance between exploration and exploitation, between wider and narrower hypothesis search, and between innovation and imitation in cultural learning. In particular, different developmental periods may be associated with different learning strategies. This relation between biology and culture was probably coevolutionary and bidirectional: life-history changes allowed changes in learning, which in turn both allowed and rewarded extended life histories. In two studies, we test how easily people learn an unusual physical or social causal relation from a pattern of evidence. We track the development of this ability from early childhood through adolescence and adulthood. In the physical domain, preschoolers, counterintuitively, perform better than school-aged children, who in turn perform better than adolescents and adults. As they grow older learners are less flexible: they are less likely to adopt an initially unfamiliar hypothesis that is consistent with new evidence. Instead, learners prefer a familiar hypothesis that is less consistent with the evidence. In the social domain, both preschoolers and adolescents are actually the most flexible learners, adopting an unusual hypothesis more easily than either 6-y-olds or adults. There may be important developmental transitions in flexibility at the entry into middle childhood and in adolescence, which differ across domains.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.