Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People make decisions based on probabilistic information everyday and often use innacurate, heuristic decision rules. Although a great deal of research has investigated the developmental trajectory of accurate probability ojudgements, very little research has investigated how the learning process unfolds. In the current study a microgenetic experimental design was deployed to investigate the influence of feedback on children's probailistic decision making strategies. Seven- to ten-year-old children (N = 50) first performed a computer-based task to asses the type of strategy they use in a probabilitstic judgement task. Next, children recieve feedback on a series of 24 trials and then perform a post-test consisting of the same computer based strategy assessment. Findings revealed that some strategies may benefit from feedback more than others. These results suggest that children can learn about the proportional nature of probability from feedback alone and that the amount and type of feedback influence the learning process.