ArticleNPJ science of learning2020
The rational use of causal inference to guide reinforcement learning strengthens with age.
Article in NPJ science of learning, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Deciding for others diminishes model-based decision-making but depends on individual prosociality.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
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- The influence of exposure to early-life adversity on agency-modulated reinforcement learning.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2025Article
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- Adolescents flexibly adapt action selection based on controllability inferences.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Transfer of Learned Cognitive Flexibility to Novel Stimuli and Task Sets.Psychological science · 2023Article
- Learning when effort matters: neural dynamics underlying updating and adaptation to changes in performance efficacy.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Flexibility in valenced reinforcement learning computations across development.Child development · 2022Article
- Children are full of optimism, but those rose-tinted glasses are fading-Reduced learning from negative outcomes drives hyperoptimism in children.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2022Article
- Developmental shifts in computations used to detect environmental controllability.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- The effect of obstructed action efficacy on reward-based decision-making in healthy adolescents: a novel functional MRI task to assay frustration.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Pruning recurrent neural networks replicates adolescent changes in working memory and reinforcement learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Uncertainty about others' trustworthiness increases during adolescence and guides social information sampling.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Causal Inference Gates Corticostriatal Learning.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Adjudicating Between Local and Global Architectures of Predictive Processing in the Subcortical Auditory Pathway.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2021Review
- Reinforcement learning across development: What insights can we draw from a decade of research?Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Beliefs about the controllability of positive or negative events in the environment can shape learning throughout the lifespan. Previous research has shown that adults' learning is modulated by beliefs about the causal structure of the environment such that they update their value estimates to a lesser extent when the outcomes can be attributed to hidden causes. This study examined whether external causes similarly influenced outcome attributions and learning across development. Ninety participants, ages 7 to 25 years, completed a reinforcement learning task in which they chose between two options with fixed reward probabilities. Choices were made in three distinct environments in which different hidden agents occasionally intervened to generate positive, negative, or random outcomes. Participants' beliefs about hidden-agent intervention aligned with the true probabilities of the positive, negative, or random outcome manipulation in each of the three environments. Computational modeling of the learning data revealed that while the choices made by both adults (ages 18-25) and adolescents (ages 13-17) were best fit by Bayesian reinforcement learning models that incorporate beliefs about hidden-agent intervention, those of children (ages 7-12) were best fit by a one learning rate model that updates value estimates based on choice outcomes alone. Together, these results suggest that while children demonstrate explicit awareness of the causal structure of the task environment, they do not implicitly use beliefs about the causal structure of the environment to guide reinforcement learning in the same manner as adolescents and adults.
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