PNAS: Three-year-olds don't use the concept of possibility when making decisions

Considering that young people grow up to experience relatively more relaxed changes, children develop quickly at a young age; Many parents will say that the difference between the ages of
two and three for children is huge and challenging.
Cognitive psychologists at Harvard University recently conducted a study to explore whether young children are able to develop the ability to consider other possibilities when making plans, and at what age
.

If one prize is hidden in a closed container and the second prize is hidden in a closed container, then choosing a container will expect to maximize
the reward.
But about 50% of the time, a three-year-old will choose one of them, and any one of them may be empty — "may" is the keyword
.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which details three studies, the researchers found that three-year-olds do not use the concept of possibility such as "maybe" and therefore cannot indicate that one of the two containers may or may not contain a prize
.

In this case of prize occlusion, the wise decision is to choose a single container rather than one in a
pair.
However, as the researchers write, "young children make surprisingly unwise decisions
when faced with multiple possibilities.
" "Slightly older two-year-olds make smart choices 50 percent of the time — just like chimpanzees," the authors note
.
Three-year-olds make informed choices
60% of the time.

The researchers found this behavior to be highly replicable, and they wanted to know what drives this computational process
.
Children know where the prize is in
a container.
But they mentally simulate another prize into one of the two containers and are unable to deploy the concept of possibility, treating this simulation as fact rather than one
of two possibilities.

This calculation error occurs in several ways: the researchers noted that the child may have a bias to the right or left; During the setup phase, they can only focus on one goal; It may also be a completely random choice
.
They sought to test these hypotheses
through three studies.

Study One: Choose one of the three

The first study simply tried to replicate earlier findings that three-year-olds made informed choices
60 percent of the time.
A group of 20 three-year-olds took four tests and chose a box to receive the contents
inside.
The results are very close
to previous studies.

By applying a Bayesian generalized linear hybrid model to the results, the researchers determined that the children were not randomly selected
.
Two subsequent studies aimed to judge three hypotheses: the concept of the possibility of deployment in children; They give a minimal description of the possibilities; They deployed these low-level policies
in three container tasks.

Study Two: Throw it away

In the second study, children were taught to throw away one box and then accept the contents
of the remaining two boxes.
Children who apply the concept of possibility or the smallest expression of possibility should discard one or the
other most of the time.

The researchers noted that if the children were randomly selected, the results should be similar
to the first task.
But in this study, the children did discard one of them, ruling out the hypothesis that they employed low-level strategies; As a result, children either gave a minimal expression of the possibilities, or when asked to think about which container was empty, they deployed concepts
of possibility such as "maybe.
" The purpose of Study 3 is to make a ruling
between these assumptions.

Study three: Throw it away and pick one of the two

The third study, involving 24 3-year-olds, included eight trials in which children threw away a box and chose to keep one
of the remaining two.
The children accidentally threw one of them more often than expected, which is the same
as the results of study two.

After throwing out one of the pair, the wise decision is to choose a box, as the remaining boxes may or may not contain prizes
.
Children who describe the possibilities the least, that is, those who believe that their mental simulations are facts, will believe that there is a coin in the remaining two boxes and therefore in half the cases an informed choice
should be made.

In the third study, children had a 50% chance of choosing individual boxes instead of the remaining boxes; Thus, the weight of the evidence suggests that children have the fewest descriptions of possibilities rather than strong notions of possibility ("may" or "may not"
).

The researchers believe that children may have concepts of possibility, but performance problems on tasks may prevent them from deploying them
.
Future research could develop new tasks with multiple performance requirements to explore these possibilities
.