Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Historically, research on preschool-aged children’sprobabilistic reasoning abilities has yielded mixed results.Although some findings have suggested that young childrencan successfully evaluate probabilities, others have suggestedthat they may use strategies that only approximate trueprobabilistic inference and therefore sometimes make errors(e.g., Girotto et al., 2016; Piaget & Inhelder, 1975). To explorethe factors that affect young children’s probabilistic reasoning,we developed a battery of problems that contained features thataffect the ease with which a problem is evaluated, and the typesof alternative strategies that can be applied to solve them. Thecurrent experiments (total N = 124) assessed 3- and 4-year-oldchildren’s probabilistic reasoning using an experimentalparadigm tailored to this age group. Results from bothexperiments suggest that young children are able to engage intrue probabilistic inference, as they performed well-abovechance on each problem. Nuances in children’s performanceare discussed, along with possibilities for future research.