Foundations of intuitive power analyses in children and adults

Madeline C. Pelz, Kelsey R. Allen, Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura E. Schulz ()
Additional contact information
Madeline C. Pelz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Kelsey R. Allen: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Joshua B. Tenenbaum: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Laura E. Schulz: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, vol. 6, issue 11, 1557-1568

Abstract: Abstract Decades of research indicate that some of the epistemic practices that support scientific enquiry emerge as part of intuitive reasoning in early childhood. Here, we ask whether adults and young children can use intuitive statistical reasoning and metacognitive strategies to estimate how much information they might need to solve different discrimination problems, suggesting that they have some of the foundations for ‘intuitive power analyses’. Across five experiments, both adults (N = 290) and children (N = 48, 6–8 years) were able to precisely represent the relative difficulty of discriminating populations and recognized that larger samples were required for populations with greater overlap. Participants were sensitive to the cost of sampling, as well as the perceptual nature of the stimuli. These findings indicate that both young children and adults metacognitively represent their own ability to make discriminations even in the absence of data, and can use this to guide efficient and effective exploration.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01427-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:11:d:10.1038_s41562-022-01427-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01427-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().