Learning to adaptively cooperate through social interactions during childhood and adolescence

Humans develop the ability to navigate social environments by recognizing others’ behavioral patterns, which evolve across development. We asked how children adapt their learning strategies to opponents in a social dilemma (Chicken game), focusing on trial-by-trial, opponent-sensitive adaptation. Study 1 included preschoolers, while Study 2 examined school-age children and adolescents. Across ages, children adjusted their choices to their opponents, showing more cooperative behavior (“Swerve” choices) against high-competitive opponents and more competitive behavior (“Go straight” choices) against low-competitive opponents. Reinforcement learning model comparison suggested age-related changes in the relative support for reward-based versus belief-based accounts. These findings provide computational evidence consistent with developmental changes in how children adapt to competitive versus cooperative partners.