The computational basis of following advice in adolescents

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.11.019Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Adolescents are more easily influenced than children and adults.

  • Adolescents rely more strongly on their own experience and explore more.

  • Computational models reveal intricate interaction between advice and experience.

Abstract

Advice taking helps one to quickly acquire knowledge and make decisions. This age-comparative study (in children [8- to 10-year-olds], adolescents [13- to 15-year-olds], and adults [18- to 22-year-olds]) investigated developmental differences in how advice, experience, and exploration influence learning. The results showed that adolescents were initially easily swayed to follow peer advice but also switched more rapidly to exploring alternatives like children. Whereas adults stayed with the advice over the task, adolescents put more weight on their own experience compared with adults. A social learning model showed that although social influence most strongly affects adolescents’ initial expectations (i.e., their priors), adolescents showed higher exploration and discovered the other good option in the current task. Thus, our model resolved the apparently conflicting findings of adolescents being more and less sensitive to peer influence and provides novel insights into the dynamic interaction between social and individual learning.

Introduction

Advice taking can foster learning and decision making, particularly if decisions are complex and the given information is incomplete (Biele, Rieskamp, Krugel, & Heekeren, 2011). For instance, when you arrive in a new city and must pick a restaurant for dinner, to make a more informed decision, you ask others who have previously visited this city for advice. After following the initial advice, you might also start gathering firsthand experience. For instance, after visiting the recommended restaurant a few times, you might learn that you do not like it that much and start exploring other options.

Taking advice is a common form of social learning1 and influences one’s own subsequent learning experiences (Biele et al., 2011, Biele et al., 2009, Goodyear et al., 2016). However, the degree to which social information and one’s own experience are used in learning varies significantly across development (Rodriguez, Heekeren, Li, & Eppinger, 2018). Adolescents in particular show a specific susceptibility to social influence, particularly to that of their own peers (Albert et al., 2013, Rodman et al., 2017, Sebastian et al., 2010). In this study, we aimed to better understand how this adolescent-specific susceptibility to peer influence shapes adolescents’ subsequent learning behavior and decision making.

Recent experimental studies have started to outline developmental differences in how susceptibility to social influence shapes behavior (Lourenco et al., 2015, Monahan et al., 2009, Steinberg and Monahan, 2007, Steinberg, 2008, Sumter et al., 2009). Consistent with conventional wisdom, these studies show that social information becomes increasingly influential on behavior during adolescence, particularly when it comes from peers (Albert et al., 2013, Blakemore and Mills, 2014, Jones et al., 2014). More specifically, the tendency to rely on social information is particularly prominent during early adolescence (lasting until approximately 15 years of age; see also Blakemore and Mills, 2014, Gardner and Steinberg, 2005, Gunther Moor et al., 2010, Sebastian et al., 2010). Many of these experimental studies compared behavior in the presence or absence of a passively observing peer (Cascio et al., 2015, Chein et al., 2011, Gardner and Steinberg, 2005, Powers et al., 2018, Somerville et al., 2018). However, adolescents often make important decisions in the absence of peers, which raises an important question—how, and for how long, does social information influence learning and decision making when peers are no longer present?

To date, little is known about how or for how long social information from peers affects adolescents’ learning and decision making. To our knowledge, only one study partly addressed this question. In this study, Decker et al. showed that in a learning task adolescents relied less on intentionally false instructions compared with adults (Decker, Lourenco, Doll, & Hartley, 2015). Instead, adolescents relied more on their own experience than on the feedback presented during the learning episode of the task. The authors suggested that instruction biases learning through the top-down influence of the prefrontal cortex and that, due to decreased striatal–prefrontal connectivity (Imperati et al., 2011, Liston et al., 2006), adolescents are less influenced by instructions.2 However, developmental differences during instruction-based learning could also have led to behavioral differences in this study. For instance, developmental differences in explorative behavior during learning can contribute to a reduced instruction bias in children and adolescents. Previous research has shown that children and adolescents explore more options than adults (Christakou et al., 2013). Thus, adolescents might have learned earlier that the instructions were false and that better options were available, which raises another important issue. If we want to understand how social information affects adolescents in the absence of peers, we must understand how it interacts with their own experience, particularly given the well-established findings on developmental differences in learning from experience (Crone et al., 2004, Crone et al., 2006, Eppinger et al., 2009, Ferdinand and Kray, 2014, Hämmerer et al., 2010, van den Bos et al., 2012, van Duijvenvoorde et al., 2008). One consistent result from these studies is that performance increases across adolescence. In addition, these studies show that children have greater difficulty in using negative feedback for learning (Crone et al., 2004, Eppinger et al., 2009, Hämmerer et al., 2010, van den Bos et al., 2012, van Duijvenvoorde et al., 2008). Thus, to understand the unique and lasting effect of social information on adolescent behavior, we also must consider developmental differences in experience-based learning.

To resolve these outstanding issues, we used a specifically designed social reinforcement learning (RL) task in combination with computational modeling. The task involves both social information- and experience-based learning (modified Iowa Gambling Task after Biele et al., 2011). Computational models have the advantage that they can be used to test different theories about the latent processes that underlie social influence and learning (van den Bos, Bruckner, Nassar, Mata, & Eppinger, 2018).

In the current task, participants (children, adolescents and adults) needed to choose one of four card decks that were associated with gains and losses (see Fig. 1A). Unbeknownst to the participants, two of the four decks were associated with higher expected positive values (“good decks”) than the other two (“bad decks”) (see Fig. 1B). At the beginning of the experiment, participants received good advice (i.e., for one of the good decks) from a same-aged peer. After the advice was given, the participants were free to draw from each of the decks as often as they liked. Both good decks were equally good (equal payoff distributions); thus, if the participants explored the other decks, they could over time learn that there was another equally good deck. Furthermore, if the initial advice was completely ignored, participants were expected to draw equally often from each of the good decks. However, Biele et al. (2011) showed that, using the exact same task, adults keep preferring the advised good deck. Thus, the task was designed such that the extent to which the other good deck is selected captures the influence of the advice. In that sense, the other good (nonrecommended) deck served as a “nonsocial” condition. Finally, we used computational modeling to separate the effects of advice, experience (positive and negative), and exploration on learning behavior (for more details on models, see Method). As noted above, each of these aspects could contribute to developmental differences in following advice.

Based on previous studies, we expected the susceptibility to peer influence to peak in adolescents (Steinberg & Monahan, 2007) compared with children and adults. Furthermore, we expected that influence would be particularly strong at the beginning of the task before learning by experience took over (Decker et al., 2015). In addition, we expected that throughout learning, children and adolescents would show more exploration than adults (Christakou et al., 2013, Decker et al., 2015). Thus, the two younger groups should be faster in discovering that there is another (equally) good deck in the experiment. Finally, children were expected to show less optimal performance overall due to their difficulty in using negative feedback for learning (van Duijvenvoorde et al., 2008). We have developed several computational RL models to capture the interaction among these different elements (social influence, exploration, and experience; see Method for detailed model predictions).

Section snippets

Participants

The effective sample of the study consisted of 25 adults aged 18–22 years (13 female; mean age = 20.32 years, SD = 1.15), 24 adolescents aged 13–15 years (12 female; mean age = 13.71 years, SD = 0.75), and 24 children aged 8–10 years (10 female; mean age = 9.08 years, SD = 0.83) (see online supplementary material for a justification of age group selection). Our sample size estimation was based on a study by van den Bos et al. (2012) that used a feedback-based learning task, similar RL models to

Choice behavior

In a first step, we checked to what extent each deck was selected above chance level (i.e., 25%) averaged across all trials (i.e., 210) using one-tailed t tests. As seen in Fig. 2A, the adults and adolescents selected the recommended deck above chance (ts > 2.60, ps ≤ .01), but the children did not, t(23) = 1.53, p = .14. The adolescents chose bad decks below chance (ts > −2.73, ps ≤ .01), whereas the adults and children did not (ts > −2.00, ps ≥ .006) (see Fig. 2A). As expected, most

Discussion

In this developmental study, we used a four-armed bandit task that included peer advice in children (8–10 years old), adolescents (13–15 years old), and young adults (18–22 years old). As expected, all age groups followed the advice at the beginning of the task; however, after a few trials, the behavior of the different age groups started to diverge. The most salient developmental differences suggest that (a) adolescents are initially the most sensitive to advice, (b) adults most consistently

Conclusion

Taken together, our findings show that peer advice guides learning from one’s own experience and that adolescents show the highest initial susceptibility to peer advice. Crucially, higher exploration rates enable adolescents to discover other opportunities. Thus, our results extend previous findings by showing that adolescents’ more exploratory behavior could be—depending on the environmental structure—even more beneficial than less exploratory learning strategies. Taken together, these

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Valerie Keller, Raphael Schultz and Jann Wäscher for help during data acquisition, Lukas Nagel for programming the task and our participants for their contribution to the study. This work was supported by the Freie Universität Berlin, the Jacobs Foundation, and an Open Research Area grant (ID 176), European Research Council grant (ERC-2018-StG-803338) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research grant (NWO-VIDI 016.Vidi.185.068) awarded to W.VD.B. Julia

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