{"pk":49686,"title":"Infants' understanding of rates and probability matching in a foraging task","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cognitive scientists have long debated whether human learners are rational decision-makers. Much work has found that adults and children tend to use probability matching strategies in probability learning tasks despite probability maximizing being the optimal strategy. However, other work provides conflicting findings on what decision-making strategies are used and under what circumstances. Unlike previous studies that employed a typical design with a single individual making decisions (where probability maximizing is the optimal strategy), we investigate decision-making strategies in a group foraging context where probability matching is the optimal strategy. In the current study, we tested 14- to 20-month-old infants' ability to (1) distinguish rates of reward distribution in a group foraging scenario and (2) their expectations for probability matching based on these rates. Our results are the first to suggest infants are capable of quantitative reasoning involving rates and they form expectations for optimal decision-making strategies based on rate information.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Cognitive development; Decision making; Group Behaviour; Reasoning"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d37s9rh","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alyson","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wong","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Fei","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49686/galley/37648/download/"}]}