Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: How do people make such rich inferences from such sparse data?Recent research has explored this inferential ability by investigating probabilistic reasoning in infancy.For example, 8-and 11-month-old infants can make inferences from samples to populations and vice versa (Denison & Xu, 2010a;Xu & Garcia, 2008).The current experiment investigates the developmental origins of this probabilistic inference mechanism with 4-and 6-month-old infants.Infants were shown 2 large boxes, 1 containing a ratio of 4 pink to 1 yellow balls, the other containing the opposite ratio.The experimenter sampled from, e.g., the mostly pink box, and removed either 4 pink and 1 yellow or 4 yellow and 1 pink ball on alternating trials.6-but not 4-month-olds looked longer at the 4 yellow and 1 pink ball sample (the improbable outcome) than the 1 yellow and 4 pink ball sample (the probable outcome).
Authors: Stephanie Denison, Christie Reed, Fei Xu
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2574964214