Strategic trade-off between sampling and remembering in young children using 2-AFC, Experiment 1

Looking at a shopping list or using a smartphone to recall a birthday are examples of sampling information in the world to save us the effort of remembering it ((Risko & Gilbert, 2016). Whether we rely more on external sources of information or our own memory depends on the relative effort each of the options requires, as we tend to minimize overall effort (Draschkow et al., 2021). This is the sampling-remembering trade-off: we tend to look more (sample the environment) when remembering is ‘costly’ (e.g. when a shopping list is difficult to memorize, full of unfamiliar ingredients, say) and remember more when sampling is costly (e.g. when a shopping list is hard to access, for instance in your partner’s pocket instead of your own). Children demonstrate this trade-off when counting on their fingers as they learn arithmetic. Yet, little research has been devoted to understanding how this trade-off can be characterized in young children. Here, we will use a novel, gamified paradigm (Liang et al., 2023) to test how the sampling-remembering tradeoff affects how many items children decide to memorize. Previous studies focusing on the sampling-remembering trade-off may have been affected by differences between individuals’ response biases (Brady et al., 2023; Macmillan & Creelman, 2004). The current study will avoid this by using a forced-choice method, which allows for the most valid assessment of memory performance.