Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children can represent, compute, and manipulate numbers from very early in development. Additionally, beginning in infancy, children appear to have intuitions about probability, correctly anticipating the outcomes of simple sampling events. In two experiments, we examined 3- to 7-year-olds’ (N=196) ability to compare the number of items across sets in games of chance. In Experiment 1, children were asked to select between two games with different numbers of hiding locations to either find or hide a gold coin. Using a similar set up, in Experiment 2, they were asked to select the game that would make it easy or hard for another player to find the coin. Results from both experiments suggest that by around age 5, children can use numerical reasoning to compare odds: they were more likely to select the game with more cups when asked to help hide the gold coin than find it (Experiment 1) and when asked to make the game hard rather than easy (Experiment 2).