TY - JOUR T1 - Developmental asymmetries in learning to adjust to cooperative and uncooperative environments JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2020.07.29.226332 SP - 2020.07.29.226332 AU - Bianca Westhoff AU - Lucas Molleman AU - Essi Viding AU - Wouter van den Bos AU - Anna C. K. van Duijvenvoorde Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/29/2020.07.29.226332.abstract N2 - Learning to successfully navigate social environments is a critical developmental goal, predictive of long-term wellbeing. However, little is known about how people learn to adjust to different social environments, and how this behaviour emerges across development. Here, we use a series of economic games to assess how children, adolescents, and young adults learn to adjust to social environments that differ in their level of cooperation (i.e., trust and coordination). Our results show an asymmetric developmental pattern: adjustment requiring uncooperative behaviour remains constant across adolescence, but adjustment requiring cooperative behaviour improves markedly across adolescence. Behavioural and computational analyses reveal that age-related differences in this social learning are shaped by age-related differences in the degree of inequality aversion and in the updating of beliefs about others. Our findings point to early adolescence as a phase of rapid change in cooperative behaviours, and highlight this as a key developmental window for interventions promoting well-adjusted social behaviour.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -