Let us know if you have any feedback/comments!
I want to thank all my amazing co-authors/advisors: Aaron Nakamura, Jialing Ding, Naohiro Okada, Shinsuke Koike, Sho Yagishita, Shin Ishii, Haruo Kasai, @yukoy.bsky.social, @mcai.bsky.social

🌟 We believe understanding these developmental changes can help in designing better educational tools and strategies that align with how learning evolves throughout life. [10/N]

💡 These shifts might suggest how our cognitive processes become more nuanced. We’re constantly adjusting how we learn from the world—generalizing when it helps, discriminating when it’s necessary. [9/N]

…As people age, they rely less on general categories and more on specific experiences with individual items. Their brains are fine-tuning the balance between generalizing and discriminating. [8/N]

🤔 What’s behind this improvement? We found it’s a mix of increased confidence in decisions, better memory retention, less random exploring, and interestingly, a decreased reliance on category-based learning. [7/N]

📈 As children grow, their decision-making improves at both the category and individual item levels. They’re not just lumping things together; they’re also noticing differences within categories. [6/N]

👶Even children as young as 3-4 years old could generalize based on these categories! They used their budding semantic knowledge to make choices. [5/N]

We used a reward-learning game with items organized into categories. [4/N]

🍎 Generalization lets us predict that if apples are sweet, other fruits might be too. But not all fruits are sweet—lemons, anyone? 🍋 This is where discrimination comes in. Balancing these helps us make better decisions. How does this evolve in kids? [3/N]

Ever wondered how children and adults learn differently from past experiences? Let’s explore! [2/N]

🧠 Happy to share our preprint: “The developmental trajectories of generalization and discrimination in reinforcement learning reflect multiple underlying cognitive processes” 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps...
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