Experiential reward learning outweighs instruction prior to adulthood

• Published in: Cognitive, affective, & behavioral neuroscience Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 310 - 320
• Main Authors: Decker, Johannes H., Lourenco, Frederico S., Doll, Bradley B., Hartley, Catherine A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2015; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Age Factors; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Child; Choice Behavior - physiology; Cognitive Psychology; Feedback, Psychological - physiology; Female; Humans; Learning - physiology; Male; Neuropsychological Tests; Neurosciences; Probability Learning; Psychology; Psychology, Developmental; Reward; Young Adult; Decision-making; Development; Cognitive control; Reinforcement learning
• ISSN: 1530-7026; 1531-135X
• DOI: 10.3758/s13415-014-0332-5

Throughout our lives, we face the important task of distinguishing rewarding actions from those that are best avoided. Importantly, there are multiple means by which we acquire this information. Through trial and error, we use experiential feedback to evaluate our actions. We also learn which actions are advantageous through explicit instruction from others. Here, we examined whether the influence of these two forms of learning on choice changes across development by placing instruction and experience in competition in a probabilistic-learning task. Whereas inaccurate instruction markedly biased adults’ estimations of a stimulus’s value, children and adolescents were better able to objectively estimate stimulus values through experience. Instructional control of learning is thought to recruit prefrontal–striatal brain circuitry, which continues to mature into adulthood. Our behavioral data suggest that this protracted neurocognitive maturation may cause the motivated actions of children and adolescents to be less influenced by explicit instruction than are those of adults. This absence of a confirmation bias in children and adolescents represents a paradoxical developmental advantage of youth over adults in the unbiased evaluation of actions through positive and negative experience.