Denison Stephanie, Xu Fei
University of Waterloo, Department of Psychology, Canada.
University of California, Berkeley, Department of Psychology, USA.
Cognition. 2014 Mar;130(3):335-47. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.001. Epub 2013 Dec 31.
Reasoning under uncertainty is the bread and butter of everyday life. Many areas of psychology, from cognitive, developmental, social, to clinical, are interested in how individuals make inferences and decisions with incomplete information. The ability to reason under uncertainty necessarily involves probability computations, be they exact calculations or estimations. What are the developmental origins of probabilistic reasoning? Recent work has begun to examine whether infants and toddlers can compute probabilities; however, previous experiments have confounded quantity and probability-in most cases young human learners could have relied on simple comparisons of absolute quantities, as opposed to proportions, to succeed in these tasks. We present four experiments providing evidence that infants younger than 12 months show sensitivity to probabilities based on proportions. Furthermore, infants use this sensitivity to make predictions and fulfill their own desires, providing the first demonstration that even preverbal learners use probabilistic information to navigate the world. These results provide strong evidence for a rich quantitative and statistical reasoning system in infants.
在不确定情况下进行推理是日常生活的基本要素。心理学的许多领域，从认知、发展、社会到临床，都关注个体如何利用不完整信息进行推理和决策。在不确定情况下进行推理的能力必然涉及概率计算，无论是精确计算还是估计。概率推理的发展起源是什么？最近的研究开始探讨婴儿和幼儿是否能够计算概率；然而，以前的实验混淆了数量和概率——在大多数情况下，年幼的人类学习者可能依靠绝对数量的简单比较，而不是比例，来在这些任务中取得成功。我们进行了四项实验，提供证据表明12个月以下的婴儿对基于比例的概率表现出敏感性。此外，婴儿利用这种敏感性进行预测并满足自己的需求，首次证明即使是不会说话的学习者也会使用概率信息来探索世界。这些结果为婴儿丰富的定量和统计推理系统提供了有力证据。
