Twelve- to 14-month-old infants can predict single-event probability with large set sizes

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Stephanie Denison1, Fei Xu

  • 1Department of Psychology, 3210 Tolman Hall, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. smdeniso@berkeley.edu

Developmental Science
|August 18, 2010
PubMed

Insights

Infants can predict outcomes involving large numbers of items, demonstrating an understanding of single-event probability. This research suggests a novel prediction task is more effective than traditional methods for assessing infant cognitive abilities.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Probabilistic Reasoning

Background:

  • Infants demonstrate reasoning about single-event probabilities, but typically only with small set sizes.
  • Previous studies often used looking-time tasks, which may not fully capture infants' predictive capabilities.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether infants can reason about single-event probabilities with large set sizes.
  • To introduce and validate a novel prediction task for assessing infant probabilistic reasoning.

Main Methods:

  • Infants participated in a preference trial to establish their color preference (pink or black lollipops).
  • In a test trial, infants observed two jars with differing proportions of pink and black lollipops.
  • Following the presentation of occluded lollipops from each jar, infants' choices were recorded.

Main Results:

  • Infants significantly preferred searching the cup containing a lollipop from the jar with a higher proportion of their preferred color (78% accuracy).
  • Performance was significantly above chance, indicating successful probabilistic reasoning with large set sizes.

Conclusions:

  • Infants possess the ability to reason about single-event probabilities even with large set sizes.
  • The novel choice-based prediction task appears to be a more sensitive measure of infant probabilistic reasoning than standard looking-time paradigms.

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