Children's recognition of the usefulness of a record: Distinguishing deterministic and probabilistic events

Abstract

Children aged six, eight, and ten years were asked to decide which of two devices—one deterministically functioning and the other probabilistically functioning—they wanted to keep a record of in order to find out whether or not the device worked properly. The devices were a ball-dropping device (deterministic) and a spinner (probabilistic). To investigate the devices, the children were asked to observe—and potentially record—only as many events as necessary in order to determine the function of each device with sufficient certainty. Children investigated both devices first in a rigged and then in a natural state. In Experiment 1, only the ten year olds showed a good understanding of a record's relative usefulness for investigating the functioning of the probabilistic in preference to the deterministic device. Younger children did not adapt the record keeping to the different kinds of functioning. This might have been related to their difficulties in understanding the deterministic character of the ball-dropping device, therefore its deterministic character was made more salient in Experiment 2. However, this manipulation did not change the results. In both experiments, only the ten year olds appeared to have a good understanding of the fact that a decision about the probabilistic nature of an event sequence requires a relatively large number of observations and therefore, if faced with a choice, a record is more useful for the investigation of probabilistic than deterministic phenomena.