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ERIC Number: EJ781406
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2008-Jan
Pages: 20
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0010-0277
EISSN: N/A
Children's Understanding of Posterior Probability
Girotto, Vittorio; Gonzalez, Michael
Cognition, v106 n1 p325-344 Jan 2008
Do young children have a basic intuition of posterior probability? Do they update their decisions and judgments in the light of new evidence? We hypothesized that they can do so extensionally, by considering and counting the various ways in which an event may or may not occur. The results reported in this paper showed that from the age of five, children's decisions under uncertainty (Study 1) and judgments about random outcomes (Study 2) are correctly affected by posterior information. From the same age, children correctly revise their decisions in situations in which they face a single, uncertain event, produced by an intentional agent (Study 3). The finding that young children have some understanding of posterior probability supports the theory of naive extensional reasoning, and contravenes some pessimistic views of probabilistic reasoning, in particular the evolutionary claim that the human mind cannot deal with single-case probability.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A