Working memory shapes information sampling and attention allocation across development

Human information sampling undergoes fundamental changes during development: Young children sample broadly, whereas adults attend selectively to goal-relevant information. The mechanisms driving these differences remain unclear. Previous explanations-inhibition failure, noisy processing, and information-seeking-cannot fully account for the empirical data. We test an alternative hypothesis that broad information sampling may stem from working memory constraints limiting children's ability to maintain internal attentional maps that guide sampling decisions. In three experiments, we examined how taxing working memory through a dual-task paradigm affects adults' information sampling in decision making and category learning. Adults under working memory load shifted their sampling patterns toward those observed in young children-successful task performance coupled with broad exploration and distributed attention. Notably, computational modeling revealed that these adults, like children, remembered supposedly irrelevant information better than selective attention models predicted, demonstrating broader information encoding rather than generalized task impairment. These findings provide causal evidence for working memory's role in shaping information sampling across development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).