Abstract
We investigate the evolution of probabilistic reasoning with age and some related biases, such as the negative/positive recency effects. Primary school children and college students were presented with probability tasks in which they were asked to estimate the likelihood of the next occurring event after a sequence of independent outcomes. Results indicate that older children perform better than younger children and college students. Concerning biases, the positive recency effect decreases with age whereas no age-related differences are found for the negative recency effect. Theoretical and educational implications of results are discussed.
Highlights
Cognitive heuristics Probabilistic thinking has been found to be related to cognitive heuristics
The representativeness heuristic is well-known to affect probabilistic reasoning: people estimate the likelihood of an event by judging how well it represents its parent population; this heuristic can cause some predictable errors in certain situations
Primary school and college students show both normative and heuristic reasoning when asked to estimate the likelihood of the event after a sequence of independent outcomes
Summary
Cognitive heuristics Probabilistic thinking has been found to be related to cognitive heuristics. The representativeness heuristic is well-known to affect probabilistic reasoning: people estimate the likelihood of an event by judging how well it represents its parent population; this heuristic can cause some predictable errors in certain situations. If a coin is flipped four times and there is a consecutive sequence of four tails, people commonly believe that heads is more likely to occur next. By applying the representativeness heuristic, the consecutive sequence of four tails is not representative of the expected 50 : 50 distribution. People become victims of the fallacy because they believe the likelihood of an event is related to the outcomes of previous tosses, i.e. the fact that single tosses are independent events is not taken into account
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