Children Optimize for Explore Instead of Exploit

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The process of exploring and narrowing down possibilities is likened to a temperature metaphor, where a high temperature search involves random and broad exploration, similar to the behavior of a four-year-old. This broad search allows for exploring various possibilities and learning as much as possible, even though it may involve trying out strange and unhelpful things. Children are found to make high temperature explore decisions compared to adults, which shows their inclination towards exploration and learning.

Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpose from the study of human cognition as a developmental, stage- wise process to the refinement and application of machine learning technologies?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we talk to SFI External Professor Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, author of numerous books on psych, cognitive science, childhood development. She writes a column at The Wall Street Journal, alternating with Robert Sapolsky. Slate said that Gopnik is “where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.” In our conversation we discuss the tension between exploration and exploitation, the curious evolutionary origins of human cognition, the value of old age, and she provides a sober counterpoint about life in the age of large language machine learning models.

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Mentioned & Related Links:

Alison Gopnik at Wikipedia

Alison Gopnik’s Google Scholar page

Explanation as Orgasm
by Alison Gopnik

Twitter thread for Gopnik’s latest SFI Seminar on machine learning and child development

Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood
by Gopnik et al.

Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters
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Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions
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The Origins of Common Sense in Humans and Machines
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