What happens before and when children decide? A systematic review on the development of decision-making processes

Making a decision in sports games is quite a hard task, especially for a young player, because before making the decision, he/she needs to generate options. These predecisional processes are of crucial importance but are most of the time neglected. By taking a developmental perspective we addressed the interplay of predecisional process and selection aim to deepen our understanding of how cognitive decision-making processes develop during childhood. To get a complete picture of how decision-making processes develop, we conducted a systematic literature review (PRISMA) including studies from sport and developmental psychology. Studies involving children and addressing predecisional processes (i.e., option generation, information search) were included. Ecological rationality served as a theoretical framework because it covers predecisional processes and has been applied in both fields. In particular, the results were interpreted with respect to the person- (i.e., developmental changes, age effects, expertise effects) and environment-level (i.e., tasks conducted, stimuli used, manipulations) effects. A total of N = 21 empirical studies were included in the review. The studies were systematically compared (i.e., integrated and differentiated) with respect to the methodological design and the results were qualitatively reinterpreted through the ecological rationality framework. First, person-level effects of age and expertise on quality of the first option, number of options generated and quality of the decisions were comparable in developmental and sport studies. Second, environment-level effects of task-complexity differed between developmental and sport studies. The results allow future tests of decision-making models and specific theoretical predictions on what happens before and when children decide.