Sensitivity to the Instrumental Value of Choice Increases Across Development

Abstract

Across development, people tend to demonstrate a preference for contexts in which they have the opportunity to make choices. However, it is not clear how children, adolescents, and adults learn to calibrate this preference based on the costs and benefits of agentic choice. Here, in both a primary, in-person, reinforcement-learning experiment ( N = 92; age range = 10–25 years) and a preregistered online replication study ( N = 150; age range = 8–25 years), we found that participants overvalued agentic choice but also calibrated their agency decisions to the reward structure of the environment, increasingly selecting agentic choice when choice had greater instrumental value. Regression analyses and computational modeling of participant choices revealed that participants’ bias toward agentic choice—reflecting its intrinsic value—remained consistent across age, whereas sensitivity to the instrumental value of agentic choice increased from childhood to early adulthood.