31–38个月幼儿能同时表征多个互斥可能性

A prominent hypothesis in the literature on logical reasoning suggests that, unlike human adults and older children, 3-year-olds deploy a “minimal representation of possibility” when reasoning about the existence of a reward in one of two possible locations. On this view, children are unable to represent two mutually exclusive possibilities simultaneously, and instead commit to one location for the reward in a pair of possible locations, only considering the second location once they have evidence that their first choice is not correct. Although this hypothesis may explain children’s struggles on various tests of modal reasoning, the idea that children may represent possible reward locations sequentially (rather than simultaneously) has not been directly tested. In two studies, we asked 24- to 38-month-olds to choose two of three reward locations, one of which was physically impossible. We found that children aged 31 to 38 months selected the two possible locations without feedback when required to make a simultaneous choice. We argue that these data are compatible with an ability to represent multiple mutually exclusive possibilities.