Do children think of genetic inheritance as deterministic or probabilistic? In two novel tasks, children viewed the eye colors of animal parents and judged and selected possible phenotypes of offspring. Across three studies (N = 353, 162 girls, 172 boys, 2 non-binary; 17 did not report gender) with predominantly White U.S. participants collected in 2019–2021, 4- to 12-year-old children showed a probabilistic understanding of genetic inheritance, and they accepted and expected variability in the genetic inheritance of eye color. Children did not show a mother bias but they did show two novel biases: perceptual similarity and sex-matching. These results held for unfamiliar animals and several physical traits (e.g., eye color, ear size, and fin type), and persisted after a lesson.

中文翻译：

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确定性还是概率：美国儿童对基因遗传的看法

孩子们认为基因遗传是确定性的还是概率性的？在两项新颖的任务中，孩子们观察动物父母的眼睛颜色，并判断和选择后代可能的表型。在 2019 年至 2021 年收集的以美国白人为主的三项研究中（N  = 353，162 名女孩，172 名男孩，2 项非二元；17 项未报告性别），4 至 12 岁的儿童表现出对遗传，他们接受并预期眼睛颜色遗传的变异性。孩子们没有表现出母亲偏见，但他们确实表现出了两种新颖的偏见：知觉相似性和性别匹配。这些结果适用于不熟悉的动物和一些身体特征（例如眼睛颜色、耳朵大小和鳍类型），并且在一节课后仍然存在。