Consider the Source: Adolescents and Adults Similarly Follow Older Adult Advice More than Peer Advice

Individuals learn which of their actions are likely to be rewarded through trial and error. This form of learning is critical for adapting to new situations, which adolescents frequently encounter. Adolescents are also greatly influenced by their peers. The current study tested the extent to which adolescents rely on peer advice to guide their actions. Adolescent and young adult participants completed a probabilistic learning task in which they chose between four pairs of stimuli with different reinforcement probabilities, with one stimulus in each pair more frequently rewarded. Participants received advice about two of these pairs, once from a similarly aged peer and once from an older adult. Crucially, this advice was inaccurate, enabling the dissociation between experience-based and instruction-based learning. Adolescents and adults learned equally well from experience and no age group difference was evident in the overall influence of advice on choices. Surprisingly, when considering the source of advice, there was no evident influence of peer advice on adolescent choices. However, both adolescents and adults were biased toward choosing the stimulus recommended by the older adult. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these data suggest that adolescents may prioritize the advice of older adults over that of peers in certain decision-making contexts.个体可通过试错学习得知自身哪些行为更易获得奖励。这种学习形式对于适应新环境至关重要，而青少年时常面临此类新情境。青少年同时也极易受到同伴的影响。本研究旨在探究青少年在多大程度上会依赖同伴建议来指导自身行为决策。青少年与青年成年参与者完成了一项概率学习任务：他们需在四组刺激物配对中进行选择，每组刺激物的强化概率各不相同，且每一组中均有一个刺激物的奖励出现频率更高。参与者会获得其中两组配对的建议，分别来自同龄同伴与年长成年人。关键在于，这些建议均不准确，这使得研究者能够区分基于经验的学习与基于指令的学习。青少年与成年人均可从经验中获得同等程度的学习效果，且建议对决策的整体影响未表现出显著的年龄组差异。令人意外的是，当考量建议来源时，同伴建议并未对青少年的选择产生显著影响。不过，青少年与成年人均倾向于选择年长成年人所推荐的刺激物。与传统认知相悖的是，本研究数据表明，在特定决策场景中，青少年或许会优先考量年长成年人的建议而非同伴建议。