Journal
COGNITION
Volume 112, Issue 1, Pages 97-104Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.04.006
Keywords
Statistical inference; Infant learning; Random sampling
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Research on initial conceptual knowledge and research on early statistical learning mechanisms have been, for the most part, two separate enterprises. We report a study with 11 month-old infants investigating whether they are sensitive to sampling conditions and whether they can integrate intentional information in a statistical inference task. Previous studies found that infants were able to make inferences from samples to populations, and vice versa [Xu, F., & Garcia, V. (2008). Intuitive statistics by 8-month-old infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105, 5012-5015]. We found that when employing this statistical inference mechanism, infants are sensitive to whether a sample was randomly drawn from a population or not, and they take into account intentional information (e.g., explicitly expressed preference, visual access) when computing the relationship between samples and populations. Our results suggest that domain-specific knowledge is integrated with statistical inference mechanisms early in development. Crown Copyright (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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