1-088 - Children’s Early Ability to Reason in the Face of Uncertainty

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

In the course of everyday life, we often make choices about the unknown: Should we plan an outdoor party for this weekend, given the 60% chance of rain? Will my child be happier at this daycare, or another one? Despite the ubiquity of these decisions, children’s early ability to reason about uncertain outcomes is still relatively understudied. For example, research on future thinking and planning almost always involves prospecting about events that will certainly occur, and work on causal inference is dominated by studies examining children’s inferences about deterministic (rather than probabilistic) causal systems.

In this symposium, researchers from four international labs apply diverse methods to explore the developmental trajectory (between 2 and 9 years) of children’s choices under uncertainty. Paper 1 suggests that children as young as 2 correctly choose a variable and uncertain cause over a deterministic one to increase their chances of producing a desired effect. Paper 2 demonstrates that children as young as 3 (but not 2), across a range of cultural groups, produce an appropriate motor act to ensure success in a future event with an uncertain outcome. In Paper 3, 5- and 6-year-olds (but not 4s) succeeded at a decision-making task requiring the integration of base-rates with a variable physical system. Finally, Paper 4 shows that 5-year-olds can appropriately divide labor to complete tasks ranging in difficulty based on weighing two agents’ relative skills, but cannot make similar judgments weighing their own certainty to another agent’s until around 8 years of age.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chairs

• Caren Walker, University of California, San Diego

• Stephanie Denison, University of Waterloo

Individual Presentations

• Young Children Form Overhypotheses About Uncertain Outcomes That Guide Predictions in a Causal Reasoning Task - Presenting Author: Mariel Goddu, University of California, Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Caren Walker, University of California, San Diego

• Young Children’s Capacity to Imagine and Prepare for Alternative Future Possibilities - Presenting Author: Jonathan Redshaw, University of Queensland; Non-Presenting Author: Thomas Suddendorf, University of Queensland

• Exploring Young Children’s Ability to Integrate Reliability With Probability - Presenting Author: Elizabeth Attisano, University of Waterloo; Non-Presenting Author: Samantha Gualtieri, University of Waterloo; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie Denison, University of Waterloo

• Children’s Weighing of Relative Certainty in Cooperative Tasks - Presenting Author: Carolyn Baer, University of British Columbia; Non-Presenting Author: Darko Odic, University of British Columbia