Sensitivity to the Instrumental Value of Choice Increases Across Development
Kate Nussenbaum, Perri L. Katzman, Hanxiao Lu, Samuel Zorowitz, Catherine A. Hartley
Psychological Science · 2024 · Volume 35 · Issue 8
DOI: 10.1177/09567976241256961
Abstract
Across development, people tend to demonstrate a preference for contexts in which they have the opportunity to make choices. However, it is not clear how children, adolescents, and adults learn to calibrate this preference based on the costs and benefits of agentic choice. Here, in both a primary, in-person, reinforcement-learning experiment ( N = 92; age range = 10–25 years) and a preregistered online replication study ( N = 150; age range = 8–25 years), we found that participants overvalued agentic choice but also calibrated their agency decisions to the reward structure of the environment, increasingly selecting agentic choice when choice had greater instrumental value. Regression analyses and computational modeling of participant choices revealed that participants’ bias toward agentic choice—reflecting its intrinsic value—remained consistent across age, whereas sensitivity to the instrumental value of agentic choice increased from childhood to early adulthood.
Keywords
cognitive development, agency, control, reinforcement, learning, decision-making, open data, open materials, preregistered
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.