ArticleCognitive psychology2024
The structure and development of explore-exploit decision making.
Article in Cognitive psychology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 7 citations in OpenAlex.
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence.Nature communications · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
A critical component of human learning reflects the balance people must achieve between focusing on the utility of what they know versus openness to what they have yet to experience. How individuals decide whether to explore new options versus exploit known options has garnered growing interest in recent years. Yet, the component processes underlying decisions to explore and whether these processes change across development remain poorly understood. By contrasting a variety of tasks that measure exploration in slightly different ways, we found that decisions about whether to explore reflect (a) random exploration that is not explicitly goal-directed and (b) directed exploration to purposefully reduce uncertainty. While these components similarly characterized the decision-making of both youth and adults, younger participants made decisions that were less strategic, but more exploratory and flexible, than those of adults. These findings are discussed in terms of how people adapt to and learn from changing environments over time.Data has been made available in the Open Science Foundation platform (osf.io).
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.