Hysteresis Affects Approximate Number Discrimination in Young Children

Perceptual decisions are often affected not only by the evidence gathered during a trial but also by the history of preceding trials. This effect—termed perceptual hysteresis—provides evidence for how perceptual information is represented and how it is used. The present research focuses on how the difficulty of preceding trials affects subsequent ones—we find that how well 5-year-old children perform in a 2-alternative forced-choice numerical discrimination task depends on whether they have had a prior history of easier discriminations or a prior history of harder discriminations. Furthermore, this effect is modulated by the feedback children receive. In 3 experiments, we demonstrate that these effects are not related to practice or loss of interest due to negative feedback, or simply to trial difficulty or discrim-inability. Instead, children appear to have state-dependent confidence states such that prolonged expe-rience making low-confidence decisions degrades performance, whereas prolonged experience making high-confidence decisions improves it. These results are discussed in the context of dynamical psycho-physics, representations of confidence, and work on children’s and adults ’ number perception abilities