How Uncertainty Affects Children's Exploration and Exploitation in Statistical Learning

Environmental input is inherently uncertain at both global and local levels. Depending on the level of uncertainty, cognitive systems dynamically adapt by shifting attention between exploiting learned regularities and exploring less predictable alternatives. While these dynamics are well documented in adults, how local and global uncertainty jointly influences children's exploration-exploitation strategies during statistical learning remains unclear. Combining eye-tracking with a probabilistic cueing task, this study quantified local and global uncertainty on a trial-by-trial basis to examine their effects on children's attentional preferences for cues differing in predictive value. Overall, 158 children aged 4 to 13 years passively viewed cue-target sequences in which target shapes were predicted by cues with high- and low-transitional probabilities. Results showed that under high global uncertainty, high local uncertainty biased attention toward high-predictive cues, indicating uncertainty-exploitation, whereas low local uncertainty biased attention toward low-predictive cues, suggesting certainty-exploration. Conversely, under low global uncertainty, attentional strategies reversed, shifting toward certainty-exploitation and uncertainty-exploration. These patterns were amplified in older children but attenuated in younger ones. These findings support a developmental dynamic model of exploration-exploitation in which children's attention strategies are jointly regulated by local and global uncertainty and undergo systematic change across childhood. SUMMARY: How local and global uncertainty jointly shapes the development of children's exploration-exploitation behavior during statistical learning across different ages remains poorly understood. Using eye-tracking in a probabilistic learning task, we showed that 4-13-year-olds adapt their information sampling and choices in response to overarching and trial-by-trial uncertainty. Under high global uncertainty, children relied on local uncertainty for exploitation and exploration; under low global uncertainty, they favored certainty-driven exploitation and uncertainty-driven exploration. These uncertainty-regulated strategies were amplified in older children but attenuated in younger children.