How do people make 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 & Denison, 2009; Xu & Garcia, 2008a). The…

A rich tradition in developmental psychology explores physical reasoning in infancy. However, no research to date has investigated whether infants can reason about physical objects that behave probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Physical events are often quite variable, in that similar-looking objects can be placed in similar…

Advantageous decision making progressively develops into early adulthood, most specifically in complex and motivationally salient decision situations in which direct feedback on gains and losses is provided (Figner & Weber, 2011). However, the factors that underlie this developmental improvement in decision making are still not well understood.…

Six- to 14-year olds added "winning" beads to an urn of "losing" beads in order to generate equal probabilities of choosing a winning bead from each of two urns. Found that 13-year olds integrated the two dimensions (winning and losing beads), the youngest children relied on one dimension, and 9- to 10-year olds partly combined…

Three experiments examined whether preschoolers viewed outcomes of familiar causes of illness as definite or probabilistic. Findings indicated that children judged that a common cause would affect all group members the same, and believed they could definitely predict illness outcomes in a single case, contrasting with adults' variable and…