The Misperception of Randomness: A Developmental Study

该奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(公法117-2)。它充满了统计模式，包括物体和事件在空间和时间上的分布，这些分布是由潜在的过程产生的，这些过程可以部分有序，部分随机。对随机性的正确理解是驾驭我们的统计世界的核心，使我们能够在风险和不确定性下做出正确的决定和适当的判断。心理学的科学文献研究了人类成年人如何理解世界的这种统计性质，并在他们的判断和决定中使用它。一种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，这在不同的文化中都很常见。此外，过去的研究还表明，错误地将连续事件视为比客观上更连续的事件，可能与成年人的赌博障碍有关。然而，人们对人类婴儿或儿童的随机性的误解知之甚少。这个项目调查了儿童感知随机性的认知机制的发展，并探索了错误认知是如何产生和纠正的。项目成果有助于开发更好的科学教育方法，帮助儿童和学生在区分模式和随机性方面做出准确的判断。该项目促进了对儿童对随机性和对错误判断的易感性的认知机制发展的理解。为了做到这一点，三种新的统计决策范式评估了3到10岁的儿童如何理解随机性，以及儿童如何对空间和时间的顺序模式进行推理。先前的研究表明，过度感知随机序列中虚幻的条纹或块状物的倾向可能是人类普遍存在的，这与寻找块状资源的进化史有关。这项研究使用新的任务测试了进化账户，并对这个主题的研究做出了方法论上的贡献，方法是为幼儿测试而创建的方法，这些方法可以适用于未来的婴儿(以进一步调查这种统计推理何时以及如何出现)，以及青少年(以填补我们对赌博成瘾的起源理解中的一个经验空白)。该项目提供了对随机性误解的发展图景的一个关键部分，并提供了一个从婴儿期到成年期研究这一发展的平台。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.