Humans are driven by an intrinsic motivation to learn, but the developmental origins of
curiosity‐driven exploration remain unclear. We investigated the computational principles …

What drives children to explore and learn when external rewards are uncertain or absent?
Across three studies, we tested whether information gain itself acts as an internal reward …

Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young
children guided by uncertainty‐directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic …

One of the greatest challenges for artificial intelligence is how to behave adaptively in
scenarios with uncertain or no rewards. One---and perhaps the only---way to approach such …

Children's curiosity often manifests in their exploration—actions that are intended to reveal
novel information. In this chapter, we argue that in order to understand how exploration can …

Previous research has suggested that active engagement with the world drives children's
remarkable learning capabilities. We investigated whether preschoolers are “ecological …

Examining children's decisions to explore or exploit the environment provides a window into
their developing metacognition and reflection capacities. Reinforcement learning …

Infants spend much of their time exploring objects (Herzberg et al., 2021), and object
exploration is linked to learning and development in various domains (eg, social, cognitive …

Organisms need to constantly balance the competing demands of gathering information and
using previously acquired information to obtain rewarding outcomes (ie, the “exploration …

Across development, as children acquire a deeper understanding of their environment, they
explore less and take advantage, or “exploit,” what they already know. Here, we test whether …