Reasoning skills development

Question 1

What is statistical learning?

Answer 1

Learning the patterns in the environment, that are either spatial or temporal.

Question 2

What are base rates?

Answer 2

The underlying distribution of a set of outcomes in a population.

Question 3

What is base rate neglect?

Answer 3

Making predictions about outcomes based on identifying features of specific cases, not population distributions.

Question 4

What did Xu and Garcia (2008) find in relation to base rates?

Answer 4

Infants look longer at the unexpected outcome than the expected outcome. Infants also appeared sensitive to base rates – they looked longer (i.e. were surprised) when they were first shown the contents of the box and the experimenter drew an unlikely sequence of balls.

Question 5

What is the representativeness heuristic?

Answer 5

A type of intuitive rule-of-thumb where you ignore base rate information and focus on individuating information.

Question 6

What age do children start to show sensitivity to base rates?

Answer 6

Between age 4 and 6.