Coins, spinners, and marbles in boxes!

For 4- to 9-year olds

In the first few trials of this study your child will first see coins with two colored sides, spinners with two colored sides and boxes with two colors of marbles. On each trial, your child will see coin flips, spinners or a marble fall out of a box, and will be asked to guess what color the outcome was. In the last few trials, your child will see the outcome of marbles falling out of a box, and will be asked to make judgements about the boxes. For all trials, your child will click on their guess (or they can point and a parent can help with clicking their guess).

When you ask someone to create a random sequence, it is usually not actually random! For example, when listing ten random flips for a coin, people often have a lot of strictly alternating Heads and Tails (such as HT over and over again like HTHTHTHTHT) rather than a more realistic list that has more random variation (such as sometimes having two Heads or two Tails in a row). Children and adults typically respond in the same way when generating these sequences. In this study, we look at how children create random lists, and also how they respond to different “random” lists that show more or less random variation. For example, are children surprised by a “random” coin flip that is very strictly HT over and over again?

15 minutes

You can only participate in this study once for compensation. After you participate, we’ll email you a $5 Amazon gift card from Amazon.com (via a code that can be entered online) within ten days to thank you for your time. To be eligible for the gift card, (1) Your child must be in the age range for the study, (2) English is (one of) your child's first language(s), and (3) you need to submit a valid consent statement (you and your child need to be visible in the consent video).