Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use…

A rich tradition in developmental psychology explores physical reasoning in infancy. However, no research to date has investigated whether infants can reason about physical objects that behave probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Physical events are often quite variable, in that similar-looking objects can be placed in similar…

A study of probability learning using a noncontingent binary prediction situation to evaluate the effect of pretraining reinforcement schedule. (author/MB)

Three experiments examined whether preschoolers viewed outcomes of familiar causes of illness as definite or probabilistic. Findings indicated that children judged that a common cause would affect all group members the same, and believed they could definitely predict illness outcomes in a single case, contrasting with adults' variable and…