NSF Award
2116145
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>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. <br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.
