Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA; Center for Systems Neuroscience, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2025 Jan;249:106078. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2024.106078. Epub 2024 Oct 7.
How do children think about and plan for possible outcomes of events that could happen in the future? Previous work that has investigated children's ability to think about mutually exclusive possibilities has largely focused on children's reasoning about one type of possibility-the possible locations of an object. Here, we investigated children's reasoning about another type of possibility-mutually exclusive possible identities. In two experiments (N = 201 U.S. 3- and 4-year-olds), children were told that two animal characters (e.g., a bunny and a monkey) were going to take turns sliding down a playground slide. Children were told that the animals wanted to eat their favorite foods (e.g., carrots and bananas, respectively) as soon as they got to the bottom of the slide. In an Unambiguous Identity condition, we told children the identity of the animal that would slide down. In an Ambiguous Identity condition, we told children that which animal would slide down first was unknown. To examine children's representations of possible identities, we asked children to "get snack ready." We found that children in the Unambiguous Identity condition selected only one of the snacks (i.e., the favorite snack of the animal they were told would slide down), whereas children in the Ambiguous Identity condition selected both snacks, suggesting that they were accounting for both possible identities. These results extend the literature on the development of modal reasoning to include reasoning about possible identities and suggest that this ability may be available to children as young as 3 years.
儿童如何思考和规划未来可能发生的事件的结果？先前研究儿童思考互斥可能性能力的工作主要集中在儿童对一种可能性——物体可能的位置——的推理上。在这里，我们研究了儿童对另一种可能性——互斥可能身份的推理。在两项实验中（N=201 名美国 3-4 岁儿童），向儿童讲述两个动物角色（例如，兔子和猴子）将轮流从游乐场滑梯上滑下来。告诉孩子们，一旦动物们到达滑梯底部，它们就想吃最喜欢的食物（例如，胡萝卜和香蕉）。在明确身份条件下，我们告诉孩子们将滑下的动物的身份。在模糊身份条件下，我们告诉孩子们，先滑下的动物是谁还不知道。为了考察儿童对可能身份的表征，我们要求儿童“准备零食”。我们发现，在明确身份条件下的儿童只选择了一种零食（即他们被告知将滑下的动物的最爱零食），而在模糊身份条件下的儿童则选择了两种零食，这表明他们考虑到了两种可能的身份。这些结果将模态推理的发展文献扩展到包括对可能身份的推理，并表明这种能力可能早在 3 岁时就对儿童可用。
