Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper examines the development of therepresentativeness heuristic in early childhood. Using a novelparadigm, we investigated 3- to 6-year-old children’s abilityto use base-rate and individuating information in theirpredictive inferences. In Experiment 1, we presented childrenwith base-rate and individuating information separately to testtheir ability to use each independently. In Experiment 2, wepresented children with base-rate and individuatinginformation together. Two critical trial types were used, onein which the base-rate information and individuatinginformation pointed to the same response and one in whichthe base-rate and individuating information pointed toconflicting responses. Results suggest that children progressto adult-like heuristic-based responding at 6 years of age.