Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although there is a great deal of interest in conditional probabilities in Bayesian cognitive science, there is still little understanding of how well human agents can learn them. This paper addresses the issue by theoretical and experimental means. In the theoretical part, we distinguish between cases of vacuous learning, where learned probabilistic information is not new, and belief revision is unwarranted, from cases with truly new information. In the experimental part, we investigate how well participants can distinguish these cases and how well they respect the probabilistic norms, thus adding new insights to the long-standing question of the extent to which the human mind is adapted to probabilistic norms.