Attentional mechanisms drive systematic exploration in young children

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularly valuable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision-making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children's choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children's tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children's systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.