Background: We have previously presented two educational interventions aimed to diminish causal illusions and promote critical thinking. In both cases, these interventions reduced causal illusions developed in response to active contingency learning tasks, in which participants were able to decide whether to introduce the potential cause in each…

The ability to reason inferentially is increasingly important in today's society. It is hypothesized here that engaging primary school students in informal statistical reasoning (ISI), defined as making generalizations without the use of formal statistical tests, will help them acquire the foundations for inferential and statistical thinking.…

Repeated sampling approaches to inference that rely on simulations have recently gained prominence in statistics education, and probabilistic concepts are at the core of this approach. In this approach, learners need to develop a mapping among the problem situation, a physical enactment, computer representations, and the underlying randomization…

Translators differ from each other in many ways in terms of their knowledge and professional conditions that may directly influence their translation. The present study aimed at investigating the impact of translators' academic experience on their translation quality. Following a "causal-comparative study", a sample of 100 male and…

We present a proposal--"The Sampling Hypothesis"--suggesting that the variability in young children's responses may be part of a rational strategy for inductive inference. In particular, we argue that young learners may be randomly sampling from the set of possible hypotheses that explain the observed data, producing different hypotheses with…

In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-0-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were…

A crucial task in social interaction involves understanding subjective mental states. Here we report two experiments with toddlers exploring whether they can use statistical evidence to infer the subjective nature of preferences. We found that 2-year-olds were likely to interpret another person's nonrandom sampling behavior as a cue for a…