Parents often learn the hard way that to make it anywhere on time with young children, they should calculate how much time they think they need to get ready, and then double it. It’s hard enough for adults with deep-rooted mental checklists to make it out the door; for young children, such lists give way to treasure maps. Everything from clothing choices to snacks and toys for the car requires diplomatic negotiations that can’t be rushed without risking a meltdown.

Whereas adults rely on streamlined internal mind maps to carry out their daily routines, young children’s brains appear to be wired for distraction. According to a review paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, what might look and feel like pure chaos, or worse, obstinance, is an important window into how growing minds think and learn through exploration.

Learning to Be Human

In the paper, lead author Vladimir Sloutsky, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University, revisits research his lab previously reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and notes that “children tend to explore broadly, and, despite its costs, exploration confers important benefits” early in development. In other words, Sloutsky said, “they are humans learning to be human.”

When choosing between trying something new (exploration) or repeating actions that have already proven successful (exploitation), learners of all ages encounter what researchers call the “exploration-exploitation dilemma.” Trying new things might prove to be a waste of time and energy, but repeating familiar actions could prevent someone from acquiring new skills or knowledge.

Adults are typically more exploitative, preferring to repeat actions that have previously led to successful, rewarding outcomes, while children are less selective about where they direct their attention. Sloutsky and his co-authors wanted to find out more about what is driving this exploratory behavior, particularly in children between the ages of 3 and 8.

For decades, the prevailing theory was that children explore simply because they are naturally curious, or possibly because their decision-making is more random. Sloutsky’s work offers a different explanation: early exploration is driven by the immaturity of a child’s working memory system.

Testing the Theory on Adults

A mature working memory helps adults hold onto a plan and selectively filter out distractions, while an immature working memory, by contrast, is set to “distributed attention,” meaning young children are prone to spreading their attention broadly. To test this, Sloutsky’s team overloaded adults’ working memory by asking them to complete a decision-making game while also reporting whenever two consecutive odd numbers appeared in a stream of continuous numbers. When their working memories were taxed, adults in the study abandoned their strategic choices and explored more broadly, exhibiting attentional patterns nearly identical to 5-year-olds.

While children’s lack of focus might make leaving the house a test of patience, it serves a crucial evolutionary purpose, ensuring that young learners absorb as much information as possible about the world. “Because they don’t have a fully developed working memory system, children will explore and resample, especially in less familiar situations,” Sloutsky explained.

For example, imagine you’ve researched nearby gas stations and found a couple with lower prices. You might start to frequent those stations without continuing to search for better options. Meanwhile, other stations are dropping their prices and becoming more competitive, but you won’t benefit because you are certain your initial choices are the best ones.

“Because children explore, they may not immediately optimize the benefit of the best option, but they also won’t lose out if something in the environment changes,” Sloutsky explained. “That is where exploratory behavior becomes very beneficial, guarding them against being entrapped by their own knowledge early in development.”

Sloutsky hopes studies like this help remind parents that kids “are annoying and destructive for a reason: They need to acquire a lot of knowledge in a relatively short period of time.” If you plot immaturity, measured by the onset of the first molar in mammals or the age of sexual maturity, against brain size, he noted, you will find an almost perfect dependence: the greater the brain size, the longer the period of immaturity.

“Children are almost completely immobile for the first year of life, disorganized for the next three, extreme risk-takers for the next 15 and self-insufficient for the first 22 years,” Sloutsky said.

The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. Co-authors include Qianqian Wan of the University of California, Davis and Brandon Turner of The Ohio State University.

---

Journal: Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Article Title: Working Memory, Exploration, and Cognitive Development
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2026.07.007