Preschoolers use statistics to understand others

Young children are natural psychologists, says Cornell cognitive psychologist Tamar Kushnir. By the time they're in preschool, they already understand a lot about other people's inner mental lives - their desires, preferences, beliefs and emotions. But how do they acquire this understanding? In part by using statistics, reports a new study led by Kushnir. The research, described in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, "provides the first evidence that young children can use intuitive statistical abilities to infer a psychological cause - a preference," says Kushnir, assistant professor of human development and director of the Early Childhood Cognition Laboratory in the College of Human Ecology. For example, in one experiment, preschool children saw a puppet named Squirrel remove five toys of the same type (all blue flowers) from a container full of toys and happily play with them. What varied for different children, however, were the contents of the container. For one-third of the children, all the toys were blue flowers.