Beyond belief: The probability-based notion of surprise in children.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Improbable events are surprising. However, it is unknown whether children consider probability when attributing surprise to other people. We conducted four experiments that investigate this issue. In the first three experiments, children saw stories in which two characters received a red gumball from two gumball machines with different distributions, and children then judged which character was more surprised. Experiment 1 (N = 120) shows development in children's use of probability to infer surprise. Children aged 7 correctly inferred that the character with a lower chance of getting a red gumball would be more surprised, but 4- to 6-year-olds did not. Experiment 2 (N = 120) shows that children's performance does not improve when the probability of getting a red gumball is zero and should be maximally surprising. Experiment 3 (N = 120) demonstrates that 6-year-olds' performance improves when they are prompted to consider probabilities, but not when they are prompted to consider the characters' beliefs. Experiment 4 (N = 60) replicates this finding, but using a new design in which children attributed emotions to just a single character. Together these findings suggest that by age 6, a conceptual shift occurs, in which children begin to integrate their understanding of probability with their understanding of surprise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".