Infants Use Statistical Sampling to Understand the Psychological World

Abstract

Preverbal infants engage in statistical and probabilistic inference to learn about their linguistic and physical worlds. Do they also employ probabilistic information to understand their social world? Do they infer underlying causal mechanisms from statistical data? Here, we show, with looking-time methods, that 10-month-olds attend to statistical information to understand their social–psychological world and plausibly infer underlying causal mechanisms from violations of physical probabilities.