The child as econometrician: a rational model of preference understanding in children

Recent work has shown that young children can learn about preferences by observing the choices and emotional reactions of other people, but there is no unified account of how this learning occurs. We show that a rational model, built on ideas from economics and computer science, explains the behavio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-03, Vol.9 (3), p.e92160-e92160
Main Authors: Lucas, Christopher G, Griffiths, Thomas L, Xu, Fei, Fawcett, Christine, Gopnik, Alison, Kushnir, Tamar, Markson, Lori, Hu, Jane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biology and Life Sciences
Child
Child Behavior
Child Development
Children
Children & youth
Choice Behavior - physiology
Cognition & reasoning
Comprehension - physiology
Computer and Information Sciences
Decision Making
Econometric models
Econometrics
Economic models
Economics
Engineering and Technology
Humans
Hypotheses
Information processing
Judgment - physiology
Learning - physiology
Mathematical models
Models, Statistical
Physical Sciences
Preferences
Psychology
Social Sciences
Society
Studies
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Summary:Recent work has shown that young children can learn about preferences by observing the choices and emotional reactions of other people, but there is no unified account of how this learning occurs. We show that a rational model, built on ideas from economics and computer science, explains the behavior of children in several experiments, and offers new predictions as well. First, we demonstrate that when children use statistical information to learn about preferences, their inferences match the predictions of a simple econometric model. Next, we show that this same model can explain children's ability to learn that other people have preferences similar to or different from their own and use that knowledge to reason about the desirability of hidden objects. Finally, we use the model to explain a developmental shift in preference understanding.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0092160