Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People’s predictions for real-world events have been shown tobe well-calibrated to the true environmental statistics (e.g.Griffiths and Tenenbaum 2006). Previous work, however, hasfocused on predictions for these events by aggregating acrossobservers, making a single estimate for the total durationgiven a current duration. Here, we focus on assessingpredictions for both the mean and form of distributions in thedomain of illness duration prediction at the individual level.We assess understanding for both acute illnesses for whichpeople might have experience, as well as chronic conditionsfor which people are less likely to have knowledge. Our datasuggests that for common acute illnesses people canaccurately estimate both the mean and form of thedistribution. For less common acute illnesses and chronicillnesses, people have a tendency to overestimate the meanduration, but still accurately predict the distribution form.