{"pk":24015,"title":"Young children adapt their search behavior for necessary versus merely possible outcomes","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Although even infants appear to consider multiple possibilities, preschoolers often fail tasks that require reasoning about mutually exclusive alternatives. We review two explanations for this failure: (1) children have a minimal representation of possibility and fail to distinguish necessary from merely possible outcomes; and (2) children are sensitive to this distinction, but competing motivations (e.g., the tendency to explore) can lead to apparent failures. To test these hypotheses, we assessed 3- and 4-year-olds on a novel search task. Here, children searched for an object that was dropped from either a transparent (one necessary location) or opaque (two possible locations) set of inverted Y-shaped tubes. In Exp. 1, we found that children spent less time searching the first location when there were two possible candidates. Exp. 2 replicates these results in a digital task that does not require manual search.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Cognitive development; Reasoning; Representation; Knowledge representation"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2c23r0b4","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Luisa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Andreuccioli","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Sophie","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mazor","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Katarina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Begus","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Copenhagen","department":""},{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bonawitz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Stephanie","middle_name":"","last_name":"Denison","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Waterloo","department":""},{"first_name":"Caren","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Walker","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24015/galley/13609/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24015/galley/21752/download/"}]}