Shtulman Andrew, Carey Susan
Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA.
Child Dev. 2007 May-Jun;78(3):1015-32. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01047.x.
The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, children frequently denied the possibility of events that adults judged improbable but not impossible. Three additional experiments varied the manner in which possibility judgments were elicited and confirmed the robustness of preschoolers' tendency to judge improbable events impossible. Overall, it is argued that children initially mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur for evidence that no such circumstances exist.
本研究调查了4至8岁儿童可能性判断策略的发展情况。在实验1中，48名儿童和16名成年人被问及各种非同寻常的事件在现实生活中是否可能发生。尽管所有年龄段的儿童都否认了成年人也认为不可能发生的事件的可能性，但儿童经常否认成年人认为不太可能但并非不可能发生的事件的可能性。另外三个实验改变了引出可能性判断的方式，并证实了学龄前儿童将不太可能发生的事件判断为不可能发生的倾向的稳定性。总体而言，有人认为儿童最初将自己无法想象出能使某事件发生的情况误解为不存在此类情况的证据。
