Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Simple probability judgments pervade human experience.Decades of research have revealed a pattern of heuristic errorsin simple random draw predictions of both children and adults.Participants often make their choice based on the magnitude ofthe target or the non-target set without relating the two quanti-ties. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that this biasis robust in both timed and untimed tasks (Experiment 1) andmay be overcome when the child is given the adequate amountand type of feedback (Experiment 2).