[flooo]

There is an interesting relation to this with regard to reinforcement learning (RL) where the trade-off between exploration and exploitation is one of the fundamental issues. Systematic or structured exploration has shown some success here as well.

What 'structured' means here deeply depends on the representation the agent has of the world, i.e. which states and actions are similar to each other. Current RL setups typically learn such representations on the go. Abstractions can be very powerful here.

Arguably, people also perform structured exploration on learned representations. It may be the case that the adults have learned a representation of the 'game' and their lies little exploratory value in suboptimal actions.