Is economic risk proneness in young children (Homo sapiens) driven by exploratory behavior? A comparison with capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella).

Economic risk proneness is displayed by human children and some nonhuman primate species. To explore the role of attraction toward the unknown and the unexpected in economic choices, 2.5-year-old children and capuchin monkeys were presented in Experiment 1 with a gambling task in which participants had to choose between 2 options, a secure option and a risky option characterized by an unexpected event. In contrast to capuchins, toddlers showed a strong preference for the risky option over the safe option. In Experiment 2, toddlers maintained their risky choices despite the increased salience of the safe option. In contrast to toddlers, capuchins preferentially chose the safe option in this second experiment. We argue that capuchins' risk aversion reflects an exploitation strategy of known and safe options. In human children, the attractiveness of uncertain reward appears to be linked to their novelty seeking. We argue that toddlers' risk proneness in the gain domain reflects an exploratory search strategy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Decision-making under risk of gain in young children and mangabey monkeys.

In contrast to human adults, risk proneness in the gain domain is usually observed in both young children and non-human primates. It is currently unclear what mechanism might be underlying such economic preferences. We investigated decision-making under risk of gain in toddlers and monkeys. The choices of 2.5-year-old children and red-capped mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus torquatus) were examined in a gambling task for food reward in which participants have to choose between two options, a secure option and a risky option. In contrast to monkeys, toddlers showed a strong preference for the risky option over the safe option. In order to test the hypothesis that risky choices in participants reflect inhibitory control difficulties, toddlers and mangabeys were presented in Experiment 2 with a situation analogous to that used in Experiment 1 except for the fact that the opaque cover under which was placed the secure option was replaced by a transparent cover. In this second experiment, toddlers continued to show a preference for the risky option over the safe option. In contrast, mangabeys showed a preference for the safe option over the risky option in Trial 1 but they shifted their economic preferences in Trial 2. We argue that decision-making strategies under risk of gain in both toddlers and mangabeys (a) do not reflect poor behavioral control and (b) are not reducible to perception-action couplings.

The role of motor memory in action selection and procedural learning: insights from children with typical and atypical development.

Motor memory is the process by which humans can adopt both persistent and flexible motor behaviours. Persistence and flexibility can be assessed through the examination of the cooperation/competition between new and old motor routines in the motor memory repertoire. Two paradigms seem to be particularly relevant to examine this competition/cooperation. First, a manual search task for hidden objects, namely the C-not-B task, which allows examining how a motor routine may influence the selection of action in toddlers. The second paradigm is procedural learning, and more precisely the consolidation stage, which allows assessing how a previously learnt motor routine becomes resistant to subsequent programming or learning of a new - competitive - motor routine. The present article defends the idea that results of both paradigms give precious information to understand the evolution of motor routines in healthy children. Moreover, these findings echo some clinical observations in developmental neuropsychology, particularly in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder. Such studies suggest that the level of equilibrium between persistence and flexibility of motor routines is an index of the maturity of the motor system.

Space-based visual attention: a marker of immature selective attention in toddlers?

Various studies suggested that attentional difficulties cause toddlers' failure in some spatial search tasks. However, attention is not a unitary construct and this study investigated two attentional mechanisms: location selection (space-based attention) and object selection (object-based attention). We investigated how toddlers' attention is distributed in the visual field during a manual search task for objects moving out of sight, namely the moving boxes task. Results show that 2.5-year-olds who failed this task allocated more attention to the location of the relevant object than to the object itself. These findings suggest that in some manual search tasks the primacy of space-based attention over object-based attention could be a marker of immature selective attention in toddlers.

Self-locomotion and spatial language and spatial cognition: insights from typical and atypical development.

Various studies have shown that occurrence of locomotion in infancy is correlated with the development of spatial cognitive competencies. Recent evidence suggests that locomotor experience might also be important for the development of spatial language. Together these findings suggest that locomotor experience might play a crucial role in the development of linguistic-cognitive spatial skills. However, some studies indicate that, despite their total deprivation of locomotor experience, young children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have the capacity to acquire and use rich spatial representations including good spatial language. Nonetheless, we have to be cautious about what the striking performances displayed by SMA children can reveal on the link between motor and spatial development, as the dynamics of brain development in atypically developing children are different from typically developing children.

Perceptual-motor constraints on decision making: the case of the manual search behavior for hidden objects in toddlers.

In the C-not-B task, 2.5-year-old children tend to look for an object in a location to which the hiding agent moved his hand (C) after moving an object from A to B. In three experiments, the authors investigated the nature of the constraints underlying toddlers' performance in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-olds were tested in a new version of the C-not-B task to investigate whether reaching with a detour leads to inhibition of direct visuomotor activation. The findings show that toddlers succeed more in the C-not-B task when a transparent barrier obstructs the path of the reaching movement. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that the successful performance of the children with a barrier cannot merely be the consequence of the longer duration of arm movements. In Experiment 3, pointing responses generated more toddlers' success in the C-not-B task than did reaching responses. These experiments suggest that decision-making processes and judgments in toddlers are affected by constraints intrinsic to the perceptual-motor system.

What comes first? How selective attentional processes regulate the activation of a motor routine in a manual search task.

An intriguing error has been observed in toddlers presented with a 3-location search task involving invisible displacements of an object, namely, the C-not-B task. In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the dynamics of the attentional focus process that is suspected to be involved in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-old children were tested on a new adaptation of the C-not-B task in which the opening of the experimenter's hand between cloths provided visual information about the correct localization of the toy. Children still emitted a strong response bias toward the last hiding place. In Experiment 2, 2.5-year-old children were tested on a new version of the task that was designed to investigate the role of the central location in the task. This 2nd experiment demonstrated that changing the hand's movement from A to C to B did not enable children to succeed in the task. In Experiment 3, 2.5-year-old children were tested in a situation that is analogous to the C-not-B with open hands task except for the fact that the experimenter dropped the toy under the 1st cloth in the path. Toddlers succeeded when the toy was hidden at Location A but not when it was hidden at Location B. Data indicate that attentional focus on the experimenter's hand motion is contingent on whether that stimulus is critical to performing the task. We argue that these findings provide a potential mechanism through which motor routines can be regulated in accordance with strategic intentions.

Effects of arm weight on C-not-B task performance: implications for the motor inhibitory deficit account of search failures.

Toddlers have been found to fail on a three-location search task involving the invisible displacements of an object, namely the C-not-B task. In this task, a child is shown the experimenter's hand that contains a toy. The toy then successively disappears under the three cloths (A, B, then C). The examiner silently releases the toy under the second cloth (B). The hidden object makes a bump in the B cloth that covers it. Young children emit a strong bias toward the last cloth that the experimenter's hand passes under, and this has been labeled the C-not-B error. One possible explanation for toddlers' failures in the C-not-B task is that children lack the motor inhibitory mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, the robustness of the C-not-B error was tested, in a first experiment, against variations in body parameters. By putting additional weights on the arm, the C-not-B error was reduced substantially and the C-not-B task had a higher rate of success. Indeed, in contrast to control participants, who ignored a visual clue indicating the correct location of the hidden object and reached for the last location of the experimenter's hand, the participants with arm weights initiated their reaching movements by using the visual clue. The findings from the second control group indicate that the dramatic increase in successful performance by children with arm weights is not merely a consequence of the focus on the attention to arm movements. The motion of the experimenter's hand in space appears to have made the task difficult because toddlers had no problems inferring that a lump under a cloth indicates the existence of an object without actually having watched an object be hidden there, as demonstrated in a second experiment. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that C-not-B task content activates a prepotent motor response that preempts full consideration of a visual clue indicating the correct location of the hidden object. We propose that the success in the C-not-B task of toddlers with additional arm weights could result from a disruption of automatic hand movement that is triggered by sensory signals, namely salient features of the C-not-B task.

Spatial cognition in young children with spinal muscular atrophy.

Success in visuospatial tasks has often been demonstrated in teenagers with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). However, what has been tested in these studies, with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (Wechsler, 1974) performance scale, does not deal with the spatial capacities that co-occur with the advent of self-produced locomotion. Indeed, various studies have shown that occurrence of locomotion in infancy is correlated with the development of visuospatial cognitive competencies, suggesting that locomotor experience might play a central role in spatial development, especially in the realm of manual search for hidden objects. It is thus of interest to assess spatial search skills in SMA young children suffering total deprivation of locomotor experience. Twelve Type-2 SMA children with a mean age of 30 months were compared with controls with respect to their spatial search skills in a memory-for-locations task. In this search task, hiding containers were rotated 180 degrees before search was permitted. The performance obtained with the SMA group did not differ from that obtained in the healthy control group. SMA patients searched correctly for a hidden object in the 3-choice search task. Locomotor impairment does not appear to be a key risk factor for dramatic slowing down or deviation in the development of spatial search skills, as assumed by some authors. Further research is needed to identify the alternative pathways to normal spatial development that are used by SMA young children.