What is it about?
Sometimes solving problems requires paying attention not only to the facts, but to the ways the facts might and might not be. But it seems that 3-year-olds may not be capable of paying attention to the ways the facts might and might not be. When they are making a decision in the face of multiple possibilities, they find one possibility--one way the facts might be--and treat that as the final fact of the matter.
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Photo by Ashin K Suresh on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Keeping track of the possibilities is an important part of decision making. In finding this limit on how children process information about the world around them, we learn more about how the ability to process information develops.
Perspectives
Children can do amazing things, but it's also amazing to sort out the things they cannot do. Sometimes they fail to solve incredibly simple problems, at surprisingly late ages!
Brian Leahy
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Minimal representations of possibility at age 3, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2207499119.
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