Children's understanding of habitual behaviour

Emotions before actions: When children see costs as causal

Adults expect people to be biased by sunk costs, but young children do not. We tested between two accounts for why children overlook the sunk cost bias. On one account, children do not see sunk costs as causal. The other account posits that children see sunk costs as causal, but unlike adults, think future actions cannot make up for sunk costs. These accounts make opposing predictions about whether children should see sunk costs as affecting emotions. Across three experiments, 4-7-year-olds (total N = 320) and adults (total N = 429) saw stories about characters who collected items that were easy or difficult to obtain, and predicted characters' emotions and actions. At all ages, participants anticipated that characters would feel sadder about high-cost objects, but only adults predicted that characters would keep high-cost objects. Our findings show that children see incurred costs as causal, and that costs are integrated children's and adults' theory of emotions. Moreover, the findings suggest that developmental differences in sunk cost reasoning may rest in children's incomplete mental accounting. We also discuss children's reasoning about rational and irrational action.

Sex differences in learning and performing the Go/NoGo tasks

BACKGROUND

The quality of learning and post-learning performances is critical for daily life. The behavioral flexibility is equally important for adapting the changing circumstances. The learning process requires repeated practices, which enhances prompt and proper behavioral responses, in turn, which promotes habits formation as well. Despite the well-documented sex differences in learning and performances, contradictory results were reported. A possible cause might be a systematic analysis due to specific research interests, regardless of the continuity of natural acquisition process. Here, we investigate the potential sex differences in learning, performances and adjustments of habited behaviors with regular and reversal Go/NoGo tasks.

METHODS

Both male and female Sprague-Dawley rats were used in this study. All rats were trained for a regular rodent Go/NoGo task and a subset of rats were trained for a reversal rodent Go/NoGo task, both with strict elimination criteria. The behavioral performance data were stored in PC for off-line analysis. Multiple behavioral indices were analyzed for both passed and retired rats.

RESULTS

The ability of learning the regular the reversal Go/NoGo tasks was similar for both male and female rats, however, the female rats took longer time to master the task principles in later stages for both tasks. In the regular Go/NoGo task, the female rats spent more time on completing the trial in performance optimization phases, which implied female rats were more cautious than male rats. Along with the progression of training, both male and female rats developed Go-preference strategies to perform the regular Go/NoGo task, which induced failure to meet the setting success criteria. The retired male rats exhibited shorter RTs and MTs than the retired female rats after developing Go-preference. Moreover, the time needed to complete the Go trials was significantly prolonged for male rats in the reversal Go/NoGo task.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, we conclude that distinctive strategies were employed in performing Go/NoGo tasks for both male and female rats. Male rats required less time to stabilize the performance in behavioral optimization phase. In addition, male rats were more accurate in estimating time elapsing. In contrast, female rats took more cautious considerations in performing the task, through which minimal influences were manifested in the reversal version of task.

Blind to Bias? Young Children Do Not Anticipate that Sunk Costs Lead to Irrational Choices

Young children anticipate that others act rationally in light of their beliefs and desires, and environmental constraints. However, little is known about whether children anticipate others' irrational choices. We investigated young children's ability to predict that sunk costs can lead to irrational choices. Across four experiments, 5- to 6-year-olds (total N = 185) and adults (total N = 117) judged which of two identical objects an agent would keep, one obtained at a high cost or one obtained at a low cost. In Experiment 1, adults predicted that the agent would choose the high-cost object over the low-cost one, whereas children responded at chance. Experiment 2 replicated these findings in children, but also included another condition which showed they were sensitive to future costs. They predicted that an agent would be more likely to seek out a low-cost item than a high-cost item. Experiments 3 and 4 then found that children do not anticipate the sunk cost bias in first person scenarios, or in interpersonal sunk cost scenarios, where costs are sunk by others. Taken together, our findings suggest that young children may struggle to understand and predict irrational behavior. The findings also reveal an asymmetry between how they consider sunk costs and future costs in understanding actions. We propose that this asymmetry might arise because children do not consider sunk costs as wasted.