Infants Use Statistical Sampling to Understand the Psychological World

Preverbal infants engage in statistical and probabilistic inference to learn about their linguistic and physical worlds. Do they also employ probabilistic information to understand their social world? Do they infer underlying causal mechanisms from statistical data? Here, we show, with looking‐time...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Infancy 2016-09, Vol.21 (5), p.668-676
Main Authors: Wellman, Henry M., Kushnir, Tamar, Xu, Fei, Brink, Kimberly A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Babies
Child development
Child psychology
Linguistics
Statistics
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Summary:Preverbal infants engage in statistical and probabilistic inference to learn about their linguistic and physical worlds. Do they also employ probabilistic information to understand their social world? Do they infer underlying causal mechanisms from statistical data? Here, we show, with looking‐time methods, that 10‐month‐olds attend to statistical information to understand their social–psychological world and plausibly infer underlying causal mechanisms from violations of physical probabilities.
ISSN:1525-0008
1532-7078
DOI:10.1111/infa.12131