University of California, Berkeley.
Child Dev. 2020 May;91(3):784-798. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13222. Epub 2019 Feb 9.
Two experiments were designed to investigate the developmental trajectory of children's probability approximation abilities. In Experiment 1, results revealed 6- and 7-year-old children's (N = 48) probability judgments improve with age and become more accurate as the distance between two ratios increases. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with 7- to 12-year-old children (N = 130) while also accounting for the effect of the size and the perceived numerosity of target objects. Older children's performance suggested the correct use of proportions for estimating probability; but in some cases, children relied on heuristic shortcuts. These results suggest that children's nonsymbolic probability judgments show a clear distance effect and that the acuity of probability estimations increases with age.
两个实验旨在探究儿童概率逼近能力的发展轨迹。在实验 1 中，结果表明 6 岁和 7 岁儿童（N=48）的概率判断随着年龄的增长而提高，并且随着两个比率之间的距离增加，判断变得更加准确。实验 2 复制了 7 岁至 12 岁儿童（N=130）的这些发现，同时还考虑了目标对象的大小和感知数量的影响。较大儿童的表现表明他们正确地使用比例来估计概率；但在某些情况下，儿童依赖启发式捷径。这些结果表明，儿童的非符号概率判断表现出明显的距离效应，并且概率估计的敏锐度随着年龄的增长而提高。
