Children's Sensitivity to Their Own Relative Ignorance: Handling of Possibilities Under Epistemic and Physical Uncertainty

2006/11/01 by Elizabeth J. Robinson, Elizabeth J Robinson, Martin G Rowley +7 · 84 citations
Arts and Humanities · Mathematics · Psychology · #Artificial intelligence #Block (permutation group theory) #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognition #Cognitive psychology #Computer science #Curse #Educational Strategies and Epistemologies #Epistemology #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Ignorance #Mathematics #Perspective (graphical) #Philosophy #Psychoanalysis #Psychology #Social psychology #Sociology #The Imaginary #Theory of mind

paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00964.x

published in Child Development 77(6), 1642-1655 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 2006/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26

Abstract

Children more frequently specified possibilities correctly when uncertainty resided in the physical world (physical uncertainty) than in their own perspective of ignorance (epistemic uncertainty). In Experiment 1 (N=61), 4- to 6-year-olds marked both doors from which a block might emerge when the outcome was undetermined, but a single door when they knew the block was hidden behind one door. In Experiments 2 (N=30; 5- to 6-year-olds) and 3 (N=80; 5- to 8-year-olds), children placed food in both possible locations when an imaginary pet was yet to occupy one, but in a single location when the pet was already hidden in one. The results have implications for interpretive theory of mind and "curse of knowledge."

Citations

• Children's Thinking About Counterfactuals and Future Hypotheticals as Possibilities
• Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception

Cited by

• Toddlers learn and flexibly apply multiple possibilities
• Do chimpanzees reason logically?
• Imagining what might be: Why children underestimate uncertainty
• Three- and four-year-old children represent mutually exclusive possible identities
• Understanding possibility through action: Young children’s modal reasoning in agentive contexts
• 小児高次脳機能障害の生活支援ニーズ・障害実態調査(第2報)
• The development of probabilistic reasoning during early childhood
• Episodic memory and theory of mind: A connection reconsidered
• The development of human causal learning and reasoning
• Counterfactual reasoning: developing a sense of "nearest possible world". [europepmc]
• What Could You Really Learn on Your Own?: Understanding the Epistemic Limitations of Knowledge Acquisition. [europepmc]
• How do thoughts, emotions, and decisions align? A new way to examine theory of mind during middle childhood and beyond. [europepmc]
• Preparatory responses to socially determined, mutually exclusive possibilities in chimpanzees and children. [europepmc]
• Young children's capacity to imagine and prepare for certain and uncertain future outcomes. [europepmc]
• How Wisdom Emerges from Intellectual Development: A Developmental/Historical Theory for Raising Mandelas. [europepmc]
• Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny. [europepmc]
• The pupillometry of the possible: an investigation of infants' representation of alternative possibilities. [europepmc]
• Chimpanzees prepare for alternative possible outcomes. [europepmc]
• Can chimpanzees conceive of mutually exclusive future possibilities? A Comment on: 'Chimpanzees prepare for alternative possible outcomes' (2023), by Engelmann et al. [europepmc]
• Invited Reply: Modal reasoning in non-human animals: possible ways forward. [europepmc]
• The recursive grammar of mental time travel. [europepmc]
• Do Theory of Mind and Mental Time Travel abilities build on joint cognitive foundations? [europepmc]
• Do Asian elephants plan for mutually-exclusive outcomes? [europepmc]

Related

• Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”
• Children's Thinking About Counterfactuals and Future Hypotheticals as Possibilities
• The Roles of Intuition and Informants’ Expertise in Children's Epistemic Trust
• Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future.
• Agents of possibility: Specifying which person an event involved helps children gauge what is possible