Shtulman Andrew, Harrington Charlotte, Hetzel Chloe, Kim Josephine, Palumbo Carol, Rountree-Shtulman Theodore
Department of Psychology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA.
Department of Psychology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Nov;235:105727. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105727. Epub 2023 Jun 28.
Children can be unduly skeptical of events that violate their expectations, claiming that these events neither could happen nor should happen even if the events violate no physical or social laws. Here, we explored whether children's reasoning about possibility and permissibility-modal cognition-is aided by cognitive reflection, or the disposition to privilege analysis over intuition. A total of 99 children aged 4 to 11 years judged the possibility and permissibility of several hypothetical events, and their judgments were compared with their scores on a developmental version of the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D). Children's CRT-D scores predicted their ability to differentiate possible events from impossible ones and their ability to differentiate impermissible events from permissible ones as well as their ability to differentiate possibility from permissibility in general. Such differentiations were predicted by children's CRT-D scores independent of age and executive function. These findings suggest that mature modal cognition may require the ability to reflect on, and override, the intuition that unexpected events cannot happen.
儿童可能会对违背他们预期的事件过度怀疑，声称这些事件既不可能发生也不应该发生，即使这些事件并未违反任何物理或社会规律。在此，我们探究了儿童对可能性和可允许性——模态认知——的推理是否受到认知反思的帮助，或者说是否受到优先进行分析而非依赖直觉的倾向的帮助。共有99名4至11岁的儿童对几个假设事件的可能性和可允许性进行了判断，并将他们的判断与他们在认知反思测试发展版（CRT-D）上的得分进行了比较。儿童的CRT-D得分预测了他们区分可能事件与不可能事件的能力、区分不允许事件与允许事件的能力，以及总体上区分可能性与可允许性的能力。这些区分是由儿童的CRT-D得分预测的，与年龄和执行功能无关。这些发现表明，成熟的模态认知可能需要具备反思并超越那种认为意外事件不可能发生的直觉的能力。
