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Foundations of intuitive power analyses in children and adults

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 1557–1568 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Decades of research indicate that some of the epistemic practices that support scientific enquiry emerge as part of intuitive reasoning in early childhood. Here, we ask whether adults and young children can use intuitive statistical reasoning and metacognitive strategies to estimate how much information they might need to solve different discrimination problems, suggesting that they have some of the foundations for ‘intuitive power analyses’. Across five experiments, both adults (N = 290) and children (N = 48, 6–8 years) were able to precisely represent the relative difficulty of discriminating populations and recognized that larger samples were required for populations with greater overlap. Participants were sensitive to the cost of sampling, as well as the perceptual nature of the stimuli. These findings indicate that both young children and adults metacognitively represent their own ability to make discriminations even in the absence of data, and can use this to guide efficient and effective exploration.

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Fig. 1: Ideal sampling across varied costs.
Fig. 2: Stimuli used in behavioural tasks.
Fig. 3: Adult sampling behavior for each of the ten discriminations (ranging from 51/49 to 95/5) in experiments 1 and 2.
Fig. 4: ‘Measures of adults’ metacognitive awareness before and after sampling in experiments 3a and 3b.
Fig. 5: Adult estimates and sampling behavior using numerical rather than visual proportions.
Fig. 6: Perceptual noise model fits.
Fig. 7: Children’s sampling behavior in experiment 5 and its replication.
Fig. 8: Perceptual noise model fits for Experiment 5 and its replication.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on the Open Science Foundation project page found at https://osf.io/gdp68. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Code used for data analysis is available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Boston Children’s Museum and the families who participated in this research. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. 1745302 to M.C.P., and National Science Foundation grant no. 1231216 to L.E.S. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Madeline C. Pelz, Kelsey R. Allen, Joshua B. Tenenbaum & Laura E. Schulz

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  1. Madeline C. Pelz
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  2. Kelsey R. Allen
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  3. Joshua B. Tenenbaum
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  4. Laura E. Schulz
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Contributions

M.C.P. and L.E.S. conceived and designed the behavioural studies. K.R.A. and J.B.T. contributed the computational modelling. The manuscript was written primarily by M.C.P. and L.E.S. with input and comments from K.R.A.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laura E. Schulz.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Yingying Yang, Matteo Lisi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Pelz, M.C., Allen, K.R., Tenenbaum, J.B. et al. Foundations of intuitive power analyses in children and adults. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1557–1568 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01427-2

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