Our guest this week at the SWE colloquium is Marcus Lindskog from Uppsala University, Sweden. Marcus studies how, from infancy to adulthood, humans rely on a basic cognitive system called the Approximate Number System (ANS) and how they extract statistical information from the environment. Here are the title and abstract of his talk:

Intuitive statistics – Cognitive representations and early development

Statistical information is ubiquitous in everyday life, and one of the most important features of the human mind is its ability to extract regularities and make inferences from such data. At least since the work by Brunswik, it has been suggested that people are intuitive statisticians who spontaneously estimate statistical properties in their environment and make accurate statistical inferences. In this talk I will explore the idea of people as intuitive statisticians from a cognitive and a developmental perspective. First, I will present a series of studies investigating the cognitive processes people are engaged in when making intuitive statistical judgments from sequentially presented data. This work contrasts two models for intuitive statistical judgments, summarized in the metaphors of the lazy and eager intuitive statistician. In short, the lazy statistician postpones judgments to the time of a query when the properties of a small sample of values retrieved from memory serve as proxies for population properties. In contrast, the eager statistician abstracts summary representations of population properties online from incoming data. In the second part of the talk, I will present studies exploring intuitive statistical judgments from a developmental perspective. Recently, several studies have investigated if already infants have rudimentary abilities to summarize and make inductive inferences from small sets of data. However, very little is known about the complexity of these abilities, how they develop, or how infants process statistical information. Here, I will present a series of studies that begin addressing such questions.