Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the hallmarks of inductive reasoning by adults is the diversity effect, namely that subjects draw stronger inferences from a diverse set of premise statements than from a homogenous set of premises (Osherson et al., 1990). However, past developmental work (Lopez et al., 1992; Gutheil & Gelman, 1997) has not found diversity effects with children age 9 and younger. In our own experiments, we found robust and appropriate use of diversity information in children as young as 5 years. For stimuli we used pictures of people and their possessions, rather than the stimuli concerning animals and their biological properties in past studies. We discuss implications of these results for models of inductive reasoning.