Young children's capacity to imagine and prepare for certain and uncertain future outcomes

Jonathan Redshaw, Talia Leamy, Phoebe Pincus, Thomas Suddendorf

The current study used a minimalist paradigm to examine young children's capacity to imagine and prepare for certain and uncertain immediate future outcomes. In a counterbalanced order, 2.5-year-old children (N = 32) completed twelve trials each of two tasks: (1) the forked tube task, which assessed their ability to cover two possible tube exits to ensure they would catch a single target with an uncertain future trajectory, and (2) the double tube task, which assessed their ability to cover two separate tube exits to ensure they would catch two targets with certain future trajectories. Even though the optimal preparatory action was the same across both tasks, children were much more likely to spontaneously and consistently demonstrate this action in the double tube task than the forked tube task. Children's responses were unaffected by the number of targets seen in the demonstration phase, and instead appeared to be based on the particular contingencies of each apparatus. These results are consistent with the possibility that young children specifically struggle to imagine and prepare for mutually exclusive versions of uncertain future events.