The development of probabilistic inference in infants

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Despite decades of research highlighting the difficulties that adults face when making probability computations, a great deal of recent research has revealed that infants as young as 6 months can engage in rudimentary probabilistic reasoning. That is, evidence from infants' active search and looking behaviours suggests that they can make generalizations from samples to populations, inferring that a sample of, say, 4 white and 1 red balls is more likely to have been randomly drawn from a box of mostly white balls than a box of mostly red balls. Probabilistic inferences such as these represent a powerful learning ability: Reasoning by extending specific instances (e.g., the composition of a few balls in a sample) to more general cases (e.g., an entire population), provides an efficient engine for rapid learning.