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.** Although various experiments show that infants engage in probabilistic inference, very little is known about how they make these inferences. The goal of this research program is to fill this gap. First, I will investigate the kinds of input that infants use to make probability computations, by assessing whether infants use numerical representations or continuous quantities to make probabilistic inferences. For example, infants in the experiment described above could use numbers to represent the proportions in the population, they might perceive it as "approximately 80 white balls and 20 red balls" or, conversely, they might perceive it as continuous regions of colour "approximately 80% white stuff and 20% red stuff". Previous experiments have not yet examined which of these representations infants use to compute probabilities over. Second, I will explore whether infants can make predictions using probability. Do infants observe a population and develop expectations about what a sample from that population should look like, or are they are only capable of making after-the-fact probability computations, by observing both a population and a corresponding sample? Addressing these basic questions about how infants compute probability will provide insight into how sophisticated this ability is.********************************************************************************************************