The Development of Nonsymbolic Probability Judgments in Children.

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.

Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood.

How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and adolescence allows a balance between exploration and exploitation, between wider and narrower hypothesis search, and between innovation and imitation in cultural learning. In particular, different developmental periods may be associated with different learning strategies. This relation between biology and culture was probably coevolutionary and bidirectional: life-history changes allowed changes in learning, which in turn both allowed and rewarded extended life histories. In two studies, we test how easily people learn an unusual physical or social causal relation from a pattern of evidence. We track the development of this ability from early childhood through adolescence and adulthood. In the physical domain, preschoolers, counterintuitively, perform better than school-aged children, who in turn perform better than adolescents and adults. As they grow older learners are less flexible: they are less likely to adopt an initially unfamiliar hypothesis that is consistent with new evidence. Instead, learners prefer a familiar hypothesis that is less consistent with the evidence. In the social domain, both preschoolers and adolescents are actually the most flexible learners, adopting an unusual hypothesis more easily than either 6-y-olds or adults. There may be important developmental transitions in flexibility at the entry into middle childhood and in adolescence, which differ across domains.