Kate Nussenbaum

Research Focus

Making good choices requires considering not just their immediate outcomes, but also their longer-term consequences, a cognitive process that exhibits substantial individual variability across development. Such variability may reflect adaptation to the predictability of experienced environments. In predictable environments, knowledge of the world can be used to forecast the long-term consequences of different actions. In volatile environments, however, learned action-outcome contingencies may change too rapidly to be useful. Early experiences in predictable environments may thus encourage people to learn and use contextual regularities to guide behavior, shaping the learning strategies they employ in new contexts. To test this, I will measure real-world environments (via novel experience-sampling and geolocation tracking methods), manipulate lab-based learning environments, and use computational models to assess individual differences in how 7-25 year-olds adapt their learning strategies to varying degrees of predictability. My goal is to understand how the environmental statistics people experience across development shapes how they learn and leverage knowledge of the world.