Do children match described probabilities? The sampling hypothesis applied to repeated risky choice.

One way in which children can learn about probabilities of different outcomes before making a decision is from description, for instance, by observing graphical representations of frequency distributions. But how do repeated risky choices develop in early childhood when outcome probabilities are learned from description? Integrating previous findings from children's sampling processes in causal learning and adults' repeated choice behavior, we investigated repeated choices from 201 children aged 3 to 7 years and 100 adults in a child-friendly risky choice task. We expected young children to probability match and predicted that the perceived dependency between choices would shape the underlying choice process.