Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 105, Issue 13, Pages 5012-5015Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0704450105
Keywords
infant cognition; probability; statistical inference
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Human learners make inductive inferences based on small amounts of data: we generalize from samples to populations and vice versa. The academic discipline of statistics formalizes these intuitive statistical inferences. What is the origin of this ability? We report six experiments investigating whether 8-month-old infants are intuitive statisticians. Our results showed that, given a sample, the infants were able to make inferences about the population from which the sample had been drawn. Conversely, given information about the entire population of relatively small size, the infants were able to make predictions about the sample. Our findings provide evidence that infants possess a powerful mechanism for inductive learning, either using heuristics or basic principles of probability. This ability to make inferences based on samples or information about the population develops early and in the absence of schooling or explicit teaching. Human infants may be rational learners from very early in development.
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