Abstract：
People relish thinking about coincidences-we puzzle over their meanings and delight in conveying our experiences of them to others. But whereas some research has begun to explore how coincidences are represented by adults, little is known about the early development of these representations. Here we explored factors influencing coincidence representations in both adults and children. Across two experiments, participants read stories describing co-occurring events and then judged whether these constituted coincidences. In Experiment 1 we found that adults\' coincidence judgments were highly sensitive to the presence or absence of plausible explanations: as expected, adults were more likely to judge co-occurrences as a coincidence when no explanation was available. Importantly, their coincidence judgments were also modulated by the number of events that co-occurred. Adults tended to reject scenarios involving too many co-occurring events as coincidences regardless of whether an explanation was present, suggesting that observing suspiciously many co-occurrences triggered them to infer their own underlying explanation (and thus blocking the events\' interpretation as a coincidence). In Experiment 2 we found that 4- to 10-year-old children also represent coincidences, and identify them via the absence of plausible explanations. Older children, like adults, rejected suspiciously large numbers of co-occurring events as coincidental, whereas younger children did not exhibit this sensitivity. Overall, these results suggest that representation of coincidence is available from early in life, but undergoes developmental change during the early school-age years.
摘要：
人们喜欢思考巧合——我们对它们的含义感到困惑，并乐于将我们对它们的体验传达给他人。但是，尽管一些研究已经开始探索成年人是如何表现巧合的，人们对这些表述的早期发展知之甚少。在这里，我们探讨了影响成人和儿童巧合表征的因素。在两个实验中，参与者阅读描述共同发生事件的故事，然后判断这些是否构成巧合。在实验1中，我们发现成年人的巧合判断对是否存在合理的解释非常敏感：正如预期的那样，当没有可用的解释时，成年人更有可能将共同事件判断为巧合。重要的是,他们的巧合判断也受到共同发生的事件数量的调节.无论是否存在解释，成年人都倾向于拒绝将涉及太多共同发生事件的场景视为巧合，这表明观察到许多可疑的共同事件会触发他们推断自己的潜在解释（从而阻止事件解释为巧合）。在实验2中，我们发现4至10岁的儿童也代表巧合，并通过缺乏合理的解释来识别它们。年龄较大的孩子,像成年人一样，拒绝了大量可疑的共同发生的事件作为巧合，而年幼的孩子没有表现出这种敏感性。总的来说,这些结果表明，巧合的表现可以从生命早期开始，但在学龄早期经历了发育变化。
