Talk:JCP - June 2018/@comment-35453425-20180512162242/@comment-35481611-20180517151419

You know I wanted to be really critical, but I actually think I like this as well. I especially like that here, the design is basically the focal point. They walk the reader through how kids have probabilistic reasoning come online, how tough it is to test, and how they might attempt to test it with the ultimate convenience of having a chatty bird around. Because I thought the previous nonhuman primate papers on this topic were really, really problematic in their design and analyses, this is just really refreshing.

I was thinking a lot about designs like this around thesis time. Really, we comparative people should be trying to design a version of this that requires the animal to demonstrate using the probabilistic information at a deeper level than even this (cool!) design allows. We can speculate about all the cool ways in which animals use probabilistic information in a natural environment, but we then get capped at demonstrating something matching-law-like, at best, by how tricky the experimental design has to be.

So I guess what I'm saying is that if someone wants to chat about the viability of a monkey Dynamic Systems Control task with me I'll be in Brielle's office :)