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How do children think about and plan for possible outcomes of events that could happen in the future? Previous work that has investigated children's ability to think about mutually exclusive possibilities has largely focused on children's reasoning about one type of possibility-the possible locations of an object. Here, we investigated children's reasoning about another type of possibility-mutually exclusive possible identities. In two experiments (N = 201 U.S. 3- and 4-year-olds), children were told that two animal characters (e.g., a bunny and a monkey) were going to take turns sliding down a playground slide. Children were told that the animals wanted to eat their favorite foods (e.g., carrots and bananas, respectively) as soon as they got to the bottom of the slide. In an Unambiguous Identity condition, we told children the identity of the animal that would slide down. In an Ambiguous Identity condition, we told children that which animal would slide down first was unknown. To examine children's representations of possible identities, we asked children to "get snack ready." We found that children in the Unambiguous Identity condition selected only one of the snacks (i.e., the favorite snack of the animal they were told would slide down), whereas children in the Ambiguous Identity condition selected both snacks, suggesting that they were accounting for both possible identities. These results extend the literature on the development of modal reasoning to include reasoning about possible identities and suggest that this ability may be available to children as young as 3 years., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Reasoning by exclusion allows us to form more complete representations of our environments, "filling in" inaccessible information by ruling out known alternatives. In two experiments (Experiment 1: N = 34 4- to 6-year-olds; Experiment 2: N = 85 4- to 8-year-olds), we examined children's ability to use reasoning by exclusion to infer the identity of an unknown object and investigated the role of working memory in this ability. Children were asked to encode a set of objects that were then hidden, and after a brief retention interval children were asked to select the identity of the object hidden in one of the locations from two alternatives. On some trials, all the images were visible during encoding, so selecting the correct identity when probed required successful working memory storage and retrieval. On other trials, all but one of the images was visible during encoding, so selecting the correct identity when probed also required maintaining a representation of an unknown object in working memory and then using reasoning by exclusion to fill in the missing information retroactively to complete that representation by ruling out known alternatives. To investigate the working memory cost of exclusive reasoning, we manipulated the working memory demands of the task. Our results suggest that children can use reasoning by exclusion to retroactively assign an identity to an incomplete object representation at least by 4 years of age but that this ability incurs some cognitive cost, which eases with development. These results provide new insights into children's representational capacities and on the foundational building blocks of fully developed exclusive reasoning., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

During complex tasks, we use working memory to actively maintain goal sets and direct attention toward goal-relevant information in the environment. However, working memory is severely limited, and storing information in working memory is cognitively effortful. Previous work by Kibbe and Kowler [2011, Journal of Vision, 11(3), Article 14] showed that adults strategically modulate reliance on working memory during complex, goal-oriented tasks, varying the amount of information they store in working memory depending both on the cognitive demands of the task and on the ease with which task-relevant information can be accessed from the environment. We asked whether children, whose working memory and executive functions are undergoing significant developmental change, also use working memory strategically during complex tasks. Forty-six 8-10-year-old children searched through arrays of hidden objects to find three that belonged to a given category defined over the objects' features. We manipulated the cognitive demands of the task by increasing the complexity of the category. We manipulated the exploration costs of the task by varying the rate at which task-relevant information could be accessed. We measured children's search patterns to gain insights into how the children used working memory during the task. We found that as the cognitive demands of the task increased, children stored less information in working memory, relying more on exploration. When exploration was costlier, children explored less, storing more in working memory. These results suggest that developing children, like adults, make strategic decisions about when to explore versus when to store during a complex, goal-oriented task., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Memory-guided planning involves retrieving relevant memories and applying that information in service of a goal. Previous studies have shown substantial development in this ability from 3 to 4 years of age. We investigated the emergence of memory-guided planning by asking whether 2-year-olds could draw on episodic memories of past experiences to generate and execute plans. In Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 32, ds > .7), 2-year-olds successfully did so, and this ability developed significantly across the third year of life. Furthermore, in Experiment 3 (N = 19, d = 0.63), 2-year-olds successfully applied episodic memories to guide plans in a novel problem context, suggesting flexibility in this ability. Together, these results suggest that some form of memory-guided planning emerges during the third year of life and may form the cognitive basis for episodic prospection later in development., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

We investigated whether children would be willing to sustain delaying their own gratification in order to benefit someone else. We used a modified version of the classic "marshmallow task," in which children must sustain delaying gratification in the presence of the immediate reward for an unspecified amount of time in order to receive a larger reward later. Children were assigned to one of three conditions. In the Self condition, children were given a food item and were told that if they waited to eat it, they would receive a second food item. In the Prosocial condition, children also were given a food item but were told that if they waited to eat their food item, another child would get a food item. In the Nonsocial Control condition, children were given a food item but were told that waiting to eat it would not benefit anyone. We found that children waited significantly longer in both the Self and Prosocial conditions than in the Nonsocial Control condition, and children's wait durations in the Self and Prosocial conditions were not significantly different. Our results suggest that children are willing to engage in effortful self-regulation in order to benefit another child., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)