Girotto Vittorio, Fontanari Laura, Gonzalez Michel, Vallortigara Giorgio, Blaye Agnès
Center for Experimental Research in Management and Economics, DCP, University IUAV of Venice, Italy.
Center for Experimental Research in Management and Economics, DCP, University IUAV of Venice, Italy.
Cognition. 2016 Jul;152:32-39. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.03.010. Epub 2016 Mar 22.
Preverbal infants manifest probabilistic intuitions in their reactions to the outcomes of simple physical processes and in their choices. Their ability conflicts with the evidence that, before the age of about 5years, children's verbal judgments do not reveal probability understanding. To assess these conflicting results, three studies tested 3-5-year-olds on choice tasks on which infants perform successfully. The results showed that children of all age groups made optimal choices in tasks that did not require forming probabilistic expectations. In probabilistic tasks, however, only 5-year-olds made optimal choices. Younger children performed at random and/or were guided by superficial heuristics. These results suggest caution in interpreting infants' ability to evaluate chance, and indicate that the development of this ability may not follow a linear trajectory.
处于语言发展前期的婴儿在对简单物理过程结果的反应以及选择中表现出概率直觉。他们的这种能力与以下证据相矛盾：在大约5岁之前，儿童的言语判断并未显示出对概率的理解。为了评估这些相互矛盾的结果，三项研究对3至5岁的儿童进行了婴儿能够成功完成的选择任务测试。结果表明，所有年龄组的儿童在不需要形成概率预期的任务中都做出了最优选择。然而，在概率任务中，只有5岁的儿童做出了最优选择。年幼的儿童随机行事和/或以表面的启发式方法为指导。这些结果表明在解释婴儿评估概率的能力时要谨慎，并表明这种能力的发展可能不是遵循线性轨迹。
