Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Probability influences our social inferences. Here, we explored whether preschoolers use probabilistic information to inferothers desires. Sixty 3-year-olds were shown stories where one character went to a gumball machine with mostly redgumballs and just a few purple ones and another character went to a machine with the reverse distribution. Both charactersreceived a red gumball. Children in one between-subjects condition were asked who wanted a red gumball and children ina control condition were asked who knew they would get a red gumball. Children mostly selected the character who wentto the machine with more red gumballs when asked about desires but not when asked about knowledge. This suggests that3-year-olds can use proportions to infer others desires.