Exploration Across Development: Implications for Mental Health

Speaker: Alex Lloyd, UCL
Series: Centre for Child, Adolescent & Family Research Seminar Series
Also open online: the joining details are on the talk's page.

Abstract

Across the lifespan, individuals often face choices to either stay with familiar options or explore new alternatives. For example, do you go to your favourite café for lunch or try the new place that recently opened across the road? Such decisions can be understood in context of the ‘explore/exploit trade-off’, an important feature of cognition that is pervasive across human decision-making (Lloyd et al., 2021).

It has been argued that exploration serves an important developmental purpose, allowing individuals to learn about their surroundings in youth, which allows them to capitalise on known resources in adulthood (Gopnik, 2020; Lloyd et al., 2023). Biases in explore/exploit decision-making are also associated with transdiagnostic mental health outcomes, though this evidence largely comes from adult samples (Lloyd et al., 2024), motivating questions about whether this context of decision-making is relevant for developmental psychopathology.

In this talk, I will present findings from two studies, the first examining whether biases in explore/exploit decision-making are associated with latent measures general psychopathology (the ‘p-factor’, p-free internalising problems, and p-free externalising problems) in adolescents aged 13-18.

The second study examines whether the explore/exploit trade-off can be applied to the novel context of social media to provide a mechanistic understanding of the association between social media use and mental health outcomes in young people aged 13-24.

Speaker bio

Alex Lloyd is a Lecturer in Child and Adolescent Mental Health working across the UCL-Anna Freud partnership.

His research focuses on identifying cognitive and emotional mechanisms implicated in developmental psychopathology, as well as designing interventions to prevent the onset and worsening of mental health problems in young people.

To address these questions, he draws on methods from experimental psychology, computational psychiatry and computer science, including task-based and data-driven approaches to understanding individual differences in mental health. His research is underpinned by participatory methods, and he collaborates with diverse stakeholders including clinicians, charities, schools and young people with lived experience of mental health problems.

His work has been supported by funders including the Wellcome Trust, British Academy, Huo Family Foundation and UCL Grand Challenges.

How to attend

Members of the University may attend in-person at the Old Cavendish Lab, Free School Lane (enter opposite Student Services).

The talk will also be streamed online for those unable to be there in person, and for those external to the University: