ArticleNature communications2025
Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Demographics change the relationships between socioeconomic status, white matter network organization, and cognition in children.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- A specific computational role for early-life unpredictability, and not lifelong traumatic experience, in decision-making under uncertainty.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cortical Microstructural Variations Correlate With Individual Differences in Gamified Exploration-Exploitation Behaviours.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Toward a decent learning theory: a structural-psychological framework for understanding students' appraisals of learning.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Structural stressors, neurocognition in reward-related decision making and substance use risk in Puerto Rican early adolescents at two sites: study design.Frontiers in public health · 2026Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Adolescents from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds often underperform on tests of learning and academic achievement. Existing theories propose that these disparities reflect not only external constraints, like limited resources, but also internal decision strategies that adapt to the early environment and influence learning. These theories predict that adolescents from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds explore less and exploit more, which, in turn, reduces learning and academic achievement. Here, we test this possibility and show that lower socioeconomic status in adolescence is associated with less exploration on a reward learning task (n = 124, 12-14-year-olds from the United States). Computational modeling revealed that reduced exploration was related to higher loss aversion. Reduced exploration also mediated socioeconomic differences in task performance, school grades, and, in a lower-socioeconomic status subsample, academic skills. These findings raise the possibility that learning disparities across socioeconomic status relate not only to external constraints but also to internal decision strategies and provide some mechanistic insight into the academic achievement gap.
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Registered trials
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