Teaching three-and-a-half-year-olds to reason about ambiguous evidence
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Schulz_Teaching three.pdf
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Author(s)
Schulz, Laura E.
Bonawitz, Elizabeth
Fischer, Adina
Alternative Title
Teaching the Bayesian child: Three-and-a-half-year-olds’ reasoning about ambiguous evidence
Date Issued
November 2011
Journal
Journal of Cognition and Development
Publisher
Psychology Press
Citation
Bonawitz, Elizabeth, Adina Fischer, and Laura Schulz. “Teaching 3.5-Year-Olds to Revise Their Beliefs Given Ambiguous Evidence.” Journal of Cognition and Development 13.2 (2012): 266–280.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Previous research suggests that three-year-olds fail to learn from statistical data when their prior
beliefs conflict with the evidence. Are young children’s causal beliefs are entrenched in their folk
theories or can young preschoolers rationally update their beliefs with evidence? Motivated by
Bayesian accounts of rational inference suggesting that both statistical evidence and children’s prior
beliefs should affect learning, we conducted a training study to investigate this question. Children
(mean: 45 months) were included in the study if they failed to endorse the statistically more probable
cause given ambiguous evidence (evidence in the form ABE, CAE, ADE, etc.) where the
recurring cause, A, violated children’s prior beliefs. (A was a psychological cause; the remaining
variables were biological.) The children were assigned to a Statistical Reasoning training condition,
one of two Prior Belief training conditions (Baserates or Mechanisms), or a Control condition.
Relative to the Control condition, children in the test conditions were more likely to endorse the a
priori unlikely variable on a free-explanation task. Critically, children in the Statistical Reasoning
condition passed the free-explanation task, even though their only information about the belief violating
variable came from the ambiguous evidence. This suggests that teaching children statistical
reasoning improves their ability to learn even from data inconsistent with their prior beliefs.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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DOI of Published Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2011.577701
https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2011.577701
