title: Rational action selection in 1½- to 3-year-olds following an extended training experience.
abstract: Previous studies failed to find evidence for rational action selection in children under 2 years of age. The current study investigated whether younger children required more training to encode the relevant causal relationships. Children between 1½ and 3 years of age were trained over two sessions to perform actions on a touch-sensitive screen to obtain video clips as outcomes. Subsequently, a visual habituation procedure was employed to devalue one of the training outcomes. As in previous studies, 2- and 3-year-olds chose actions associated with an expected valued outcome significantly more often during a subsequent choice test. Moreover, analysis of children's first responses in the post-devaluation test revealed evidence of rational action selection even in the youngest age group (18-23 months). Consistent with dual-process accounts of action control, the findings support the view that the ability to make rational action choices develops gradually.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EB, UK. umhk2@cam.ac.uk
authors.forename: Ulrike M H
authors.initials: UM
authors.lastname: Klossek
authors.forename: Anthony
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dickinson
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002755:Choice Behavior; D005108:Extinction, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007600:Judgment; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child