Graduate Student, School of Psychology
PhD student
College of Life and Environmental Sciences
About
After my M.Rs in the Université de Toulouse (France), for which I worked under supervision of Gaëlle Villejoubert and Étienne Mullet, I have been granted a studentship to do my PhD in the University of Birmingham (UK), under supervision of Sarah Beck.
I investigate how children understand uncertainty when it is communicated verbally, especially by verbal probabilities, and therefore how they make decision on this basis. More specifically I investigate if and how children take into account all dimensions of verbal probabilities when judging and deciding. Indeed the specificity of such expressions is that they not only communicate a degree of possibility that an event occurs (i.e. a numerical value); they also focus the attention of the listener on the outcome or on its absence because of its linguistic dimension (and especially the property called directionality).
As part of my M.Rs I realized a first study comparing 8 year-olds' (French third grade) and young adults' (undergraduates) utilization of verbal probabilities in a game situation. This work indicates that children are able to take into account the level of uncertainty to make decisions but don't judge it as accurately as adults do. Moreover they seem to judge and use verbal probabilities according to their numerical value after having first organized them according to their directionality.
Currently I am working towards replicating these results with an English-speaking population and highlighting the developmental course of verbal probabilities' comprehension by investigating both younger and older children.
Contact Information
http://www.cogdev.bham.ac.uk/people/Gourdon.shtml
Amélie Gourdon
PhD student
Cognitive Development Group
School of Psychology
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
B15 2TT
United Kingdom
