The Misperception of Randomness: A Developmental Study

该奖项全部或部分由2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。世界本质上是统计的。它充满了统计模式，包括物体和事件在空间和时间中的分布，这些分布是由潜在的过程产生的，这些过程可以是部分有序的，部分随机的。对随机性的正确理解是我们在统计世界中导航的核心，使我们能够在风险和不确定性下做出正确的决策和适当的判断。心理学的科学文献已经研究了人类成年人如何把握世界的这种统计性质，并将其用于他们的判断和决策。一个被广泛研究的现象是对随机性的误解，包括看到不存在的事件的条纹和模式，这在不同文化中普遍存在。过去的研究还表明，将连续事件误解为比客观上更容易发生，可能与成年人的赌博障碍有关。然而，关于人类婴儿或儿童对随机性的误解，我们知之甚少。本项目研究儿童对随机性的认知机制的发展，并探讨误解如何产生和纠正。项目成果有助于开发更好的科学教育方法，帮助儿童和学生在辨别随机模式时做出准确的判断。该项目促进了对儿童对随机性的感知和对错误判断的敏感性的认知机制发展的理解。为了做到这一点，三个新的统计决策范式评估3至10岁的儿童如何理解随机性，以及儿童如何推理空间和时间的顺序模式。先前的研究表明，过度感知随机序列中的虚幻条纹或团块的倾向可能是人类的共性，与觅食clueries资源的进化历史有关。该研究测试，使用新的任务，进化的帐户，并作出方法论的贡献，研究这一主题的方法创建的测试与幼儿，可以适用于未来使用的婴儿（进一步调查何时以及如何出现这种统计推理），和青少年（填补经验空白，我们的理解赌博成瘾的起源）。该项目提供了一个重要的一部分的发展图片的误解的随机性和一个平台，这种发展可以研究从婴儿到成年。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的支持，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).The world is statistical in nature. It is full of statistical patterns, including distributions of objects and events in space and time generated by underlying processes that can be partly ordered and partly random. A sound understanding of randomness is central to navigating our statistical world, enabling us to make good decisions and appropriate judgements under risk and uncertainty. The scientific literature in psychology has examined how human adults grasp this statistical nature of the world and use it in their judgments and decisions. One widely studied phenomenon is the misperception of randomness, including seeing streaks and patterns of events that do not exist, which occurs robustly across cultures. Past research has in addition shown that misperceiving sequential events as streakier than they objectively are, may be associated with gambling disorders in adults. Little is known, however, about the misperception of randomness in human infants or children. This project investigates the development of the cognitive mechanisms underlying children's perception of randomness and explores how misperceptions arise and are corrected. Project results contribute to developing better methods of science education for helping children and students to make accurate judgments in discerning patterns from randomness. The project advances understanding of the development of the cognitive mechanisms underlying children's perception of randomness and susceptibility to erroneous judgments. To do this, three novel statistical decision-making paradigms assess how 3- to 10-year-old children understand randomness, and how children reason about sequential patterns in space and time. Previous research suggests that a tendency to over perceive illusory streaks or clumps in random sequences may be a human universal, tied to an evolutionary history of foraging for clumpy resources. The study tests, using novel tasks, the evolutionary account and makes methodological contributions to research on this topic with methods created for tests with young children that can be adapted for future use with infants (to further investigate when and how this statistical reasoning emerges), and adolescents (to fill an empirical gap in our understanding of origins of gambling addictions). This project provides a crucial piece of the developmental picture of misperceptions of randomness and a platform with which this development can be studied from infancy to adulthood.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.