Although even infants appear to consider multiple possibilities, preschoolers often fail tasks that require reasoning about mutually exclusive alternatives. We review two explanations for this failure: (1) children have a minimal representation of possibility (Leahy & Carey, 2020), and simulate a single outcome when faced with multiple possibilities; (2) children are able to consider alternative possibilities, but their tendency to engage in exploratory behavior to resolve uncertainty might drive these apparent failures. To test these hypotheses, we assessed 3- and 4-year-olds on a novel search task. Here, children searched for an object that was dropped from either a fully transparent (one necessary location) or opaque (two possible locations) set of Y-shaped tubes. In Exp. 1, we found that children spent less time searching the first location when both search locations were possible candidates. Exp. 2 (ongoing) replicates these results in a context that does not require manual search.

Authors:

Luisa Andreuccioli: University of California San Diego; Sophie Mazor: University of California, San Diego; Katarina Begus: University of Copenhagen; Elizabeth Bonawitz: Harvard University; Stephanie Denison: University of Waterloo ; Caren M. Walker: University of California San Diego