Think about the decisions you make on a daily basis. Often, you have experience with the options before you, and you use that experience to drive your selections. For example, suppose your friend wants to meet you for Thai food. Over time, you have been to several Thai restaurants. If you choose the one that is typically your favorite, then you are exploiting your existing knowledge to pick an option that you know is likely to be good. However, you may have heard about a new restaurant that has just opened. If you opt to go to that one, then you are exploring the environment to see whether this new option is even better than the ones you have tried.
This tradeoff between exploring options and exploiting prior experience is an important one. Lots of research has explored factors that influence people’s tendency to explore or exploit. For example, if the environment is pretty unchanging, then people tend to find the best option and stick with it—exploiting their knowledge. If the world changes a lot over time, then people tend explore, just in case other options have gotten better.
How do people—particularly children—develop strategies for gathering information about the world? This question was addressed in a 2024 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Julie Vaisarova, Sarah Kiefer, Hilal Sen, Peter Todd, and Kelsey Lucca.
They examined whether stories might help young children learn more about when they should explore or exploit. They wrote two versions of a story suitable for 3- to 6-year-olds. One version of this story, used as a control, focused on following rules and using available tools like maps. The second version, which was designed to promote strategic exploration, had a main character that checked out new opportunities whenever they saw something new, and reacted flexibly when something unexpected happened.
In this study, children from the United States and Turkey were selected as participants to help reduce the chances that any findings were the result of engaging with children from just one culture. English and Turkish versions of the stories were developed. An adult read the story to the child and asked a few questions to engage the child along the way.
After hearing the story, the children participated in a task in which they had to search for creatures in fish tanks. Each tank had 8 hiding spots They were told that there were five tanks and that some would have lots of creatures while others wouldn’t. Children could choose to search multiple spots within a tank or to switch from one tank to another. Once they left a tank, they couldn’t go back to it. They had 10 minutes overall to search. Before children played the game, they were told to play like the character in the story they heard.
The ideal strategy in a game like this is to get a sense from the first couple of searches in a tank about whether there are likely to be a lot of fish in that tank and to search a lot in tanks that have many creatures and to leave tanks quickly when they do not. So the strategic exploration story promoted the flexibility that this task required, while the control story did not.
So, what happened?
Overall, the results were similar for the US and Turkish participants, so there were no reliable cultural differences in performance. In addition, children improved in the task with age. Older children found more rewards than younger ones.
The story the children heard did affect their performance. One finding involved children’s persistence in continuing to search in a tank after searching a location that did not have a creature behind it. Compared to the children who heard the control story, the children who heard the strategic exploration story were more likely to continue searching in tanks with many fish and less likely to continue to search in tanks with few fish. That is, the strategic exploration story led children to adapt their behavior to the tank they were currently searching.
A second big difference was that children who read the strategic exploration story spent less time searching in the first few tanks of the game and more time exploring the later tanks, while the children who read the control story did the opposite. In order to explore effectively, you have to do more exploration early when you are trying to understand the structure of the task and then you have more knowledge to exploit. So, the children who heard the strategic exploration story used a strategy that was closer to optimal than the children who heard the control story.
This study demonstrates the important role that stories can play for children as they learn to navigate the world. Stories have several characteristics that allow them to benefit young children. They are engaging, so children will listen and remember them. They provide some context so that children may be more likely to recognize when the strategies described in the story are relevant. Stories can also help to make complex strategies easier to understand by enabling the child to watch a character carrying out the strategy rather than trying to remember the component steps of that process.