Differences in learning across the lifespan emerge via resource-rational computations.
Rasmus Bruckner, Matthew R. Nassar, Shu Li, Ben Eppinger
Abstract
= 94) show that children and older adults display biases characteristic of a more frugal sampling policy. This is reflected in (a) more frequent perseveration when participants are required to update from previous beliefs and (b) a stronger anchoring bias when updating beliefs from an externally generated value. These results are qualitatively consistent with simulated predictions of our resource-rational model, corroborating the assumption that the identified biases originate from sampling. Our model and results provide a unifying perspective on perseverative and anchoring biases, show that they can jointly emerge from efficient belief-updating computations, and suggest that resource-rational adjustments of sampling computations can explain age-related changes in adaptive learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).