Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies suggest that children’s exploratory behavior is sensitive to uncertainty; however, few have approached thiswith sufficient precision to model quantitatively. Across three experiments, children (mean age=70 months) were asked to shakea box to identify which of two sets of marbles, differing in numerosity, were hidden inside. The sets’ numerosities varied in theirdiscriminability indices – the degree to which listeners can distinguish the sets based on the acoustic information generated.The time children spent shaking the box varied systematically with the discriminability of the alternative hypotheses they wereasked to distinguish, even though they heard only one set for each contrast. This suggests that children represent the uncertaintyin their own perceptual discrimination abilities (an ability we refer to as an intuitive psychophysics) and their exploratorybehavior is precisely calibrated to their degree of uncertainty about alternative hypotheses that might explain unobserved causesof perceptual data.