Perceptual Novelty Drives Early Exploration in a Bottom-Up Manner

Children are more likely than adults to explore new options, but is this due to a top-down epistemic-uncertainty-driven process or a bottom-up novelty-driven process? Given immature cognitive control, children may choose a new option because they are more susceptible to the automatic attraction of perceptual novelty and have difficulty disengaging from it. This hypothesis is difficult to test because perceptual novelty is intertwined with epistemic uncertainty. To address this problem, we designed a new n-armed bandit task to fully decouple novelty and epistemic uncertainty. By having adults and 4- to 6-year-olds perform the task, we found that perceptual novelty predominated 4-year-olds' (but not adults' or older children's) decisions even when it had no epistemic uncertainty and had the lowest reward value. Additionally, 4-year-olds showed such a novelty preference only when the option's novelty was directly observable, but not when it could only be anticipated, providing new evidence that perceptual novelty alone can drive elevated exploration in early development in a bottom-up manner.