Fig. 3: Individual variability within groups.
From: Humans monitor learning progress in curiosity-driven exploration
a Final performance was the same across instruction groups when accounting for the number of activities mastered (NAM). As expected, the NAM designation captured well the learning achievement of our participants. In light of (b), this demonstrates that many participants achieved a high performance across learning activities, even without an explicit instruction to learn. b Distributions of participants mastering 1, 2, or 3 activities in each instruction group. Whereas half of the participants in the EG group achieved high performance across learnable tasks, a sizable portion of the IG participants (almost 1/3) were motivated enough to self-challenge and learn without being asked to do so. Only 8 participants in the EG and 9 participants in the IG group failed to master even one activity. Thus, 99 participants mastered only 1 activity (NEG = 42; NIG = 57), 126 mastered two (NEG = 58; NIG = 68), and 140 mastered all three (NEG = 88; NIG = 52) (c), Time allocation patterns differed by instruction and level of achievement. The three panels show the average time allocation patterns in IG (N = 177) and EG (N = 188) groups observed over the free-play trials separately for each level of NAM (from left to right, NAM1, NAM2, and NAM3). Circle (EG) and square (IG) symbols represent the average percentage of time spent on an activity in the respective NAM-instruction group; error bars indicate the standard error; the horizontal dashed lines show random time allocation (25%). Time allocation was consistent across the levels of NAM towards harder activities in the EG group. In contrast, only the best learners in the IG group displayed a similar preference, whereas NAM1&2 participants tended towards easier activities. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
