Minimal representations of possibility at age 3.

Young children do not always consider alternative possibilities when planning. Suppose a prize is hidden in a single occluded container and another prize is hidden in an occluded pair. If given a chance to choose one container and receive its contents, choosing the singleton maximizes expected reward because each member of the pair might be empty. Yet, 3-y-olds choose a member of the pair almost half the time. Why don't they maximize expected reward? Three studies provide evidence that 3-y-olds do not deploy possibility concepts like MIGHT, which would let them represent that each container in the pair might and might not contain a prize. Rather, they build an overly specific model of the situation that correctly specifies that the singleton holds a prize while inappropriately specifying which member of the pair holds a prize and which is empty. So, when asked to choose a container, they see two equally good options. This predicts approximately 50% choice of the singleton, observed in studies 1 and 3. But when asked to throw away a container so that they can receive the remaining contents (study 2), they mostly throw away a member of the pair. The full pattern of data is expected if children construct overly specific models. We discuss whether 3-year-olds lack possibility concepts or whether performance demands prevent deployment of them in our tasks.

Neural evidence of core foundations and conceptual change in preschool numeracy.

Symbolic numeracy first emerges as children learn the meanings of number words and how to use them to precisely count sets of objects. This development starts before children enter school and forms a foundation for lifelong mathematics achievement. Despite its importance, exactly how children acquire this basic knowledge is unclear. Here we test competing theories of early number learning by measuring event-related brain potentials during a novel number word-quantity comparison task in 3-4-year-old preschool children (N = 128). We find several qualitative differences in neural processing of number by conceptual stage of development. Specifically, we find differences in early attention-related parietal electrophysiology (N1), suggesting that less conceptually advanced children process arrays as individual objects and more advanced children distribute attention over the entire set. Subsequently, we find that only more conceptually advanced children show later-going frontal (N2) sensitivity to the numerical-distance relationship between the number word and visual quantity. The nature of this response suggested that exact rather than approximate numerical meanings were being associated with number words over frontal sites. No evidence of numerical distance effects was observed over posterior scalp sites. Together these results suggest that children may engage parallel individuation of objects to learn the meanings of the first few number words, but, ultimately, create new exact cardinal value representations for number words that cannot be defined in terms of core, nonverbal number systems. More broadly, these results document an interaction between attentional and general cognitive mechanisms in cognitive development. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Conceptual development in numeracy is associated with a shift in attention from objects to sets. Children acquire meanings of the first few number words through associations with parallel attentional individuation of objects. Understanding of cardinality is associated with attentional processing of sets rather than individuals. Brain signatures suggest children attribute exact rather than approximate numerical meanings to the first few number words. Number-quantity relationship processing for the first few number words is evident in frontal but not parietal scalp electrophysiology of young children.

Many preschoolers do not distinguish the possible from the impossible in a marble-catching task.

Do preschoolers differentiate events that might and might not happen from events that cannot happen? The current study modified Redshaw & Suddendorf's "Y-shaped tube task" to test how the ability to distinguish mere possibilities from impossibilities emerges over ontogenesis. In the Y-shaped tube task, the experimenter holds a ball above a tube shaped like an upside-down "Y" and asks a participant to catch it. A participant who identifies the two possible paths the ball can take should cover both exits at the bottom of the Y. But children might cover both exits without identifying both possibilities. For example, there are two good places to put hands, so they might just put one hand in each place. This does not require checking whether there is a path from the entrance to each exit. If children cover both exits because they have identified two possible paths for the ball, then they should differentiate exits where it is possible for the ball to come out from impossible exits, where there is no path from the entrance to the exit. In total, 24 36-month-olds and 24 48-month-olds were tested. Less than 20% of 36-month-olds and only about half of 48-month-olds distinguished between possible and impossible exits. Children who do not distinguish the possible from the impossible might not be evaluating possibilities at all. Results converge with existing literature suggesting that action planning that is sensitive to incompatible possibilities often emerges after the fourth birthday.

It's not just what we don't know: The mapping problem in the acquisition of negation.

How do learners learn what no and not mean when they are only presented with what is? Given its complexity, abstractness, and roles in logic, truth-functional negation might be a conceptual accomplishment. As a result, young children's gradual acquisition of negation words might be due to their undergoing a gradual conceptual change that is necessary to represent those words' logical meaning. However, it's also possible that linguistic expressions of negation take time to learn because of children's gradually increasing grasp of their language. To understand what no and not mean, children might first need to understand the rest of the sentences in which those words are used. We provide experimental evidence that conceptually equipped learners (adults) face the same acquisition challenges that children do when their access to linguistic information is restricted, which simulates how much language children understand at different points in acquisition. When watching a silenced video of naturalistic uses of negators by parents speaking to their children, adults could tell when the parent was prohibiting the child and struggled with inferring that negators were used to express logical negation. However, when provided with additional information about what else the parent said, guessing that the parent had expressed logical negation became easy for adults. Though our findings do not rule out that young learners also undergo conceptual change, they show that increasing understanding of language alone, with no accompanying conceptual change, can account for the gradual acquisition of negation words.

Stereotypes as prototypes in children's gender concepts.

How do gender stereotypes shape prototypes across development? In the current pre-registered study with children ages 3- to 10-years-old and adults (N = 257), participants made judgements about which members of gender categories (boys and girls) and animal categories (for comparison) were the most representative and informative about their kinds, using simplified scales of five category members varying on a stereotypical feature (e.g., girls wearing more or less pink). Young children chose boys and girls with extreme stereotypical features (e.g., the girl in head-to-toe pink) as both representative and informative of their categories and this tendency declined with age, similar to developmental patterns in prototypes of animal categories. Controlling for age, children whose parents reported more conservative social-political views also held more extreme gender (but not animal) prototypes. Thus, stereotypes play a central role in children's gender prototypes, especially young children and those living in socially-conservative households. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Ps9BwuukyD0 RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Stereotypes play a central role in children's gender prototypes, especially young children and those in socially-conservative households. Children ages 3-10 and adults chose which girls, boys, and animals were most representative and informative. Younger children chose category members with more extreme stereotypical features (e.g., the girl in head-to-toe pink) than older children and adults. Children with more conservative parents also held more extreme gender prototypes.

Don't you see the possibilities? Young preschoolers may lack possibility concepts.

Preschoolers struggle to solve problems when they have to consider what might and might not happen. Instead of planning for all open possibilities, they simulate one possibility and treat it as the fact of the matter. Why? Are scientists asking them to solve problems that outstrip their executive capacity? Or do children lack the logical concepts needed to take multiple conflicting possibilities into account? To address this question, task demands were eliminated from an existing measure of children's ability to think about mere possibilities. One hundred nineteen 2.5- to 4.9-year-olds were tested. Participants were highly motivated but could not solve the problem. Bayesian analysis revealed strong evidence that reducing task demands while holding reasoning demands constant did not change performance. Children's struggles with the task cannot be explained by these task demands. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that children struggle because they cannot deploy possibility concepts that allow them to mark representations as merely possible. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Preschoolers are surprisingly irrational when faced with problems that ask them to consider what might and might not be the case. These irrationalities could arise from deficits in children's logical reasoning capacities or from extraneous task demands. This paper describes three plausible task demands. A new measure is introduced that preserves logical reasoning demands while eliminating all three extraneous task demands. Eliminating these task demands does not change performance. These task demands are not likely a cause of children's irrational behavior.

Could it? Should it? Cognitive reflection facilitates children's reasoning about possibility and permissibility.

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.

There is no privileged link between kinds and essences early in development.

According to the dominant view of category representation, people preferentially infer that kinds (richly structured categories) reflect essences. Generic language ("Boys like blue") often occupies the central role in accounts of the formation of essentialist interpretations-especially in the context of social categories. In a preregistered study (n = 240 American children, ages 4 to 9 y), we tested whether children assume essences in the presence of generic language or whether they flexibly assume diverse causal structures. Children learned about a novel social category described with generic statements containing either biological properties or cultural properties. Although generic language always led children to believe that properties were nonaccidental, young children (4 or 5 y) in this sample inferred the nonaccidental structure was socialization. Older children (6 to 9 y) flexibly interpreted the category as essential or socialized depending on the type of properties that generalized. We uncovered early-emerging flexibility and no privileged link between kinds and essences.

Giving, Receiving, and Doing Together: Interorganizational Interactions in Age-Friendly Community Initiatives.

Multi-sectoral collaboration is widely considered essential for age-friendly community change; however, there has been little empirical research to describe the ways in which organizations interact as part of age-friendly community initiatives (AFCIs). We conducted a qualitative descriptive study using data from multiple waves of semi-structured interviews with core teams of eight grant-funded AFCIs in the north-eastern U.S. We employed iterative, inductive coding to systematically describe ways in which AFCI core teams described working with other organizational entities. Findings indicated two overarching themes: (a) helping each other (giving and receiving linking, informational, and instrumental assistance), and (b) doing something together (organizing community events, planning collaborative projects, participating in meetings). We discuss the implications of this characterization for guiding research, evaluation, and policy to optimize AFCI implementation and impact across diverse settings.

Examining children's questions and parents' responses about COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey.

COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on both adults' and children's everyday lives. Conversations about biological processes such as viruses, illness, and health have started to occur more frequently in daily interactions. Although there are many guidelines for parents about how to talk to their children about the coronavirus, only a few studies have examined what children are curious about the coronavirus and how they make sense of the changes in their everyday lives. This study addresses this need by examining children's questions and parents' responses about the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Turkish sociocultural context. Using an online survey, we asked 184 parents of 3- to 12-year-olds to report their children's questions about coronavirus and their answers to these questions. We analyzed children's questions and parents' responses using qualitative and quantitative analyses (Menendez et al., 2021). Children's questions were mainly about the nature of the virus (34%), followed by lifestyle changes (20%). Older children were more likely to ask about school/work and less likely to ask about lifestyle changes than younger children. Parents responded to children's questions by providing realistic explanations (48%) and reassurance (20%). Only 18% of children's questions were explanation-seeking "why" and "how" questions. Parents were more likely to provide explanations if children's questions were explanation-seeking. Family activities such as playing games and cooking were the most common coping strategies reported by parents (69.2%). The findings have important implications for children's learning about the coronavirus and how adults can support children's learning and help them develop coping strategies in different sociocultural contexts. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-03331-4.