The Cognitive Basis of Uncertainty

Abstract

The present paper offers a review and analysis of studies of children’s understanding of certainty and uncertainty. It proceeds first by proposing requisite skills needed for insight into uncertainty. Additional skills needed for specific inferences are then considered. It is argued that discrepancies in the literature regarding the apparent age of onset of the ability to discriminate certain from uncertain inferences are partly due to the fact that different inferential skills are tapped by different tasks. The acquisition of a key skill, the withholding of judgment in insufficient-information contexts, is argued to derive from children’s ability to form equivalence classes.

Risky decision making from childhood through adulthood: Contributions of learning and sensitivity to negative feedback.

“…Older age is associated with greater use of feedback to guide behavior (Byrnes & Beilin, 1991; Byrnes & Overton, 1986). Byrnes and colleagues found that adults not only made better choices at the beginning of a decision-making task compared to adolescents, but also learned more via task experience (Byrnes, Miller, & Reynolds, 1999).…”

: From inference to reasoning: The construction of rationality

“…Children show some understanding of logical necessity, consistency, and impossibility beginning about age 6 (Ruffman, 1999;Somerville, Hadkinson, & Greenberg, 1979;Tunmer, Nesdale, & Pratt, 1983). Research also shows continuing development in the comprehension of necessity, possibility, suffi ciency, indeterminacy, and associated concepts over the remaining years of childhood (Byrnes & Beilin, 1991;Morris & Sloutsky, 2001;Piaget, 1987;Pieraut-Le Bonniec, 1980;Ricco, 1997;Ricco, McCollum, & Wang, 1997), and age-related constraints on the ability to learn such concepts (Klahr & Chen, 2003).…”

On the Difficulty of Detecting Cognitive Uncertainty

“…As discussed by Byrnes and Beilin [1991], until around age 10, children most often refuse to withhold judgment even when a problem is very simple and clearly indeter minate -that is, when the information is obviously insufficient to support the identi fication of a necessary solution. Consider for example the study of 4-through 10-year-olds by Piéraut-Le Bonniec [ 1980], Subjects were presented a box with two apertures in the top, a narrow slot and a wide hole, and two objects, a large marble and a thin stick.…”

“…But precisely what aspect of developing thought could cause children younger than 10 to find with holding judgment aversive and children older than 10 to find the same response acceptable? Byrnes and Beilin [1991] pro pose that the central cause relates to chil dren's representational ability, suggesting that young children fail to place all the pos sible solutions in an equivalence class in which the likelihood of each alternative is effectively equated. In support of this theory.…”

“…By no later than age 6, and through age 9, most children can recognize indeterminacy, but they still prefer to guess rather than leave a problem unsolved be cause, in their eyes, a declaration of undeci dability is not a solution to a problem; rath er, it is the absence of a solution. Their refu sal to place the possible solutions in a single equivalence class [Byrnes and Beilin, 1991] and their assignment of differential proba bilities to the possibilities is principally a response to their need for closure and their inability to obtain a sense of closure in a declaration that a problem is unsolvable. They need to make a choice and they need to justify that choice to themselves and to oth ers.…”