Statistics is a discipline of gathering and working with data to make sense of what's going on and to predict what might happen in the future. Sounds like a complicated task...because it actually is! Those who have studied statistics know that working with data involves a ton of formulae! But research showed that babies have the ability to understand and perform statistical calculations!?
It turns out that babies are not actually mathematically doing calculations at all. But from making observations of a pattern that was presented in front of them, babies showed an innate ability to follow and keep track of a pattern, AND make predictions of the outcome.
Either it was pattern created through sound or colour, babies showed that they could pick out the statistically unusual string. The odd one out, so to speak. They showed more interest by listening to or looking at the odd one out for a longer duration of time and with greater attentiveness.
Reported in Scientific American, one of the research study showed that 8-month-old's understood concepts of sampling from a population and improbable outcomes.
They were shown a box filled with red and white balls with a ratio of 1 red to 4 white balls.
Then the experimenter would take out 5 balls.
Here, the "population" is the box and the "sample" is the group of 5 balls.
If the experimenter took out 4 reds and 1 white, you and I might think, "That's unusual, it should be more likely to get more white balls than red ones from the box."
The babies showed the same line of thinking. They looked longer and more intently when surprised by these unexpected, improbable outcomes.
Toddlers at the age of 20 months showed the same skills with boxes of green frogs and yellow duck toys, just like the experiment mentioned above. They even showed that they could "adjust" the outcome by adding frogs or ducks, so that they could even it out to a more probable outcome.
Other studies have shown that preschool children understand the concept of probability. Not in a way that they are doing calculations to come up with percentages that represent how likely an event was to occur. But through experimenting and sensing which colour block lights up a toy machine more often than the other. Then, when asked to light up the toy machine, these children chose to use the colour block that lit up the machine more often.
The above studies and more showed that young children have this innate cognitive ability to understand the world around them by gathering their own data through observations. They draw conclusions on their own through experimenting and analyzing what they observed and experienced.
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