Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social relationships such as playmates and friendships are im-portant for children’s development. But relatively little isknown about how such relationships are formed. In two stud-ies, 5- to 6-year-old children chose their playmates in a hypo-thetical scenario that resembled a real-world social situation.The findings suggested that children used both the base-rateinformation about the social group and the adaptive samplingstrategy in playmate choice – they approached or avoided in-dividuals based on the group that the individuals belonged to,as well as their past experiences with the individuals.