The development of modal intuitions: A test of two accounts.

Young children, unlike adults, deny that improbable events can happen. We test two accounts explaining this developmental shift. The development = reflection account posits that this shift is driven by an emerging ability to reflect on modal intuitions. In contrast, the development = intuition account posits that this shift is driven by changes in modal intuitions themselves, due to age-related changes in what people know and how they sample their knowledge and memories. These accounts make competing predictions about how long children and adults should take to make possibility judgments. In Experiment 1, we asked 123 children (39 5-year-olds, 42 7-year-olds, 42 9-year-olds; 49.60% White) and 40 adults (50% White) to judge the possibility of 78 ordinary, improbable, and impossible events and recorded their response times. In Experiment 2, we tested an additional 52 adults (42.32% White) who were under speeded conditions and thus less able to reflect before responding. Our results favor the development = intuition account. At all ages, people judged improbable events more slowly than ordinary or impossible events, and slow responding did not consistently predict affirmation over denial. Further, adults' possibility judgments did not change under speeded conditions. We also fit a drift-diffusion model to our data, which suggested that adults and children may sample different kinds of knowledge when generating intuitions. Our findings suggest that possibility judgments are often driven by modal intuitions with little reflection, and that a developmental shift in what children know and how knowledge is retrieved can explain why these intuitions change over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Perceived similarity explains beliefs about possibility.

No one has ever performed a successful brain transplant or traveled the Milky Way, but people often see these events as within the realm of possibility. Across six preregistered experiments (N = 1,472) we explore whether American adults' beliefs about possibility are driven by perceptions of similarity to known events. We find that people's confidence in the possibility of hypothetical future events is strongly predicted by how similar they think the events are to events that have already happened. We find that perceived similarity explains possibility ratings better than how desirable people think the events are, or how morally good or bad they think it would be to accomplish them. We also show that similarity to past events is a better predictor of people's beliefs about future possibilities than counterfactual similarity or similarity to events in fiction. We find mixed evidence regarding whether prompting participants to consider similarity shifts their beliefs about possibility. Our findings suggest that people may reflexively use memories of known events to guide their inferences about what is possible. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Anchored in the present: preschoolers more accurately infer their futures when confronted with their pasts.

People often speculate about what the future holds. They wonder what will happen tomorrow, and what the world will be like in the distant future. Nonetheless, people's ability to consider future possibilities may be restricted when they consider their own futures. Adults show the 'end of history' illusion, believing they have changed more in the past than they will in the future. Further, preschoolers are even more limited in anticipating future change, as 3-year-olds insist their current desires will persist later in life. These findings suggest a deficit in children's and adults' abilities to simulate alternative possibilities that pertain to themselves. However, we report four experiments (n = 233) suggesting otherwise, at least for children. We find that 3-year-olds accurately infer their futures when prompted to consider their past rather than present preferences. Children also succeed at inferring their past preferences when not shown items they currently prefer. This shows that children can reason about their pasts and futures, though this ability is hindered when they are shown items that anchor them to the present. Our findings suggest that children's difficulties with mental time travel reflect a failure to shift away from the present rather than an inability to simulate alternative possibilities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Causal knowledge and children's possibility judgments.

Children often say that strange and improbable events, like eating pickle-flavored ice cream, are impossible. Two experiments explored whether these beliefs are explained by limits in children's causal knowledge. Participants were 423 predominantly White Canadian 4- to 7-year-olds (44% female) tested in 2020-2021. Providing children with causal information about ordinary events did not lead them to affirm that improbable events are possible, and they more often affirmed improbable events after merely learning that a similar event had occurred. However, children were most likely to affirm events if they learned how similar events happened (OR = 2.16). The findings suggest that knowledge of causal circumstances may only impact children's beliefs about the possibility after they are able to draw connections between potential events and known events.

A Similarity Heuristic in Children's Possibility Judgments.

Children often judge that strange and improbable events are impossible, but the mechanisms behind their reasoning remain unclear. This article (N = 250) provides evidence that young children use a similarity heuristic that compares potential events to similar known events to determine whether events are possible. Experiment 1 shows that 5- to 6-year-olds who hear about improbable events go on to judge that similar improbable events can happen. Experiment 2 shows that 5- to 6-year-olds more often affirm that improbable events can happen if told about related improbable events than if told about unrelated ones. Finally, Experiment 3 shows that 5- to 6-year-olds affirm the possibility of improbable events related to known events, but deny that related impossible events can happen.

Children's Beliefs About Possibility Differ Across Dreams, Stories, and Reality.

Are children's judgments about what can happen in dreams and stories constrained by their beliefs about reality? This question was explored across three experiments, in which four hundred and sixty-nine 4- to 7-year-olds judged whether improbable and impossible events could occur in a dream, a story, or reality. In Experiment 1, children judged events more possible in dreams than in reality. In Experiment 2, children also judged events more possible in dreams than in stories. Both experiments also suggested that children's beliefs about reality constrain their judgments about dreams and stories. Finally, in Experiment 3 children were asked about impossible events more typical of dreams and stories. In contrast with the other experiments, children now affirmed the events could happen in these worlds.

Future-oriented objects.

Hoerl & McCormack suggest that saving tools does not require temporal reasoning. However, we identify a class of objects that are only possessed (i.e., saved) in anticipation of future needs. We propose that investigating these future-oriented objects may help identify temporal reasoning in populations where this ability is uncertain.

An advantage for ownership over preferences in children's future thinking.

The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children's inferences about their future preferences with judgments about their future ownership. In Experiment 1, we show that 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 120) exhibit an ownership advantage in their future thinking-they are better able to indicate which objects they will own as adults than to indicate which they will prefer. We propose 2 explanations for this finding. First, children may rely more heavily on their semantic knowledge when inferring ownership than when inferring preferences, allowing them to sidestep the difficult task of mentally projecting themselves into the future. Second, ownership inferences may involve less conflict than preference inferences (e.g., conflict between a child's present and future desires). In Experiment 2, we test these accounts by comparing 3-year-olds' (N = 120) judgments about their own future ownership and preferences with judgments about what a present adult owns and prefers. We replicate the ownership advantage from Experiment 1 and further find that the ownership advantage holds when reasoning about a present adult. Our findings therefore support the conflict account, suggesting children struggle to infer what they will prefer as adults because their present and future preferences are in conflict. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Children hold owners responsible when property causes harm.

Since ancient times, legal systems have held owners responsible for harm caused by their property. Across 4 experiments, we show that children aged 3-7 (N = 572) also hold owners responsible for such harm. Older children judge that owners should repair harm caused by property (Experiments 1A and 1B), and younger children may do this as well (Experiment 4). Younger and older children judge that owners should apologize for harm (Experiments 2A and 3), even when children do not believe the owners allowed the harm to occur (Experiment 2B). Children are also as likely to hold owners responsible for harm caused by property as for harm caused by the owners themselves (Experiment 3). The present findings contribute to psychological accounts of ownership by showing that ownership not only confers rights to control property, but also responsibility for harm caused by property. The findings also contribute to our understanding of the attribution of responsibility, and challenge accounts claiming that directly causing harm, or allowing it to happen, is a prerequisite for responsibility. The findings provide support for an account claiming that property is an extension of its owner, and likewise reveal that responsibility for harm caused by property is an early developing aspect of the psychology of ownership. (PsycINFO Database Record

The development of territory-based inferences of ownership.

Legal systems often rule that people own objects in their territory. We propose that an early-developing ability to make territory-based inferences of ownership helps children address informational demands presented by ownership. Across 6 experiments (N = 504), we show that these inferences develop between ages 3 and 5 and stem from two aspects of the psychology of ownership. First, we find that a basic ability to infer that people own objects in their territory is already present at age 3 (Experiment 1). Children even make these inferences when the territory owner unintentionally acquired the objects and was unaware of them (Experiments 2 and 3). Second, we find that between ages 3 and 5, children come to consider past events in these judgments. They move from solely considering the current location of an object in territory-based inferences, to also considering and possibly inferring where it originated (Experiments 4 to 6). Together, these findings suggest that territory-based inferences of ownership are unlikely to be constructions of the law. Instead, they may reflect basic intuitions about ownership that operate from early in development.