Children (and Many Adults) Use Perceptual Similarity to Assess Relative Impossibility.

People see some impossible events as more impossible than others. For example, walking through a solid wall seems more impossible if it is made of stone rather than wood. Across four experiments, we investigated how children and adults assess the relative impossibility of events, contrasting two kinds of information they may use: perceptual information and causal knowledge. In each experiment, participants were told about a wizard who could magically transform target objects into other things. Participants then assessed which of the two transformation spells would be easier or harder, a spell transforming a target object into a perceptual match (i.e., a similar-looking thing) or one transforming it into a causal match (e.g., an item made of similar materials). In Experiments 1–3, children aged 4–7 mainly thought that transformations into the perceptual match would be easier, though this tendency varied with age. Adults were overall split when choosing which spell would be easier. In Experiment 1, this was because of variations in their judgments across different pairs of spells; in Experiments 2 and 4, the split resulted because different subsets of adults preferred either the perceptual or causal match. Overall, these findings show that children, and many adults, use perceptual reasoning to assess relative impossibility. Public Significance Statement: Besides differentiating possible events from ones that are impossible, people see some events as more impossible than others. We investigated how children and adults make these judgments by asking them about magical transformations. One way that people might assess the relative impossibility of magic is by drawing on their causal knowledge. However, we find that young children, and even many adults, instead make these judgments using shallow perceptual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]