Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future.

2025/07/21 by Esra Nur Turan-Küçük, Melissa M. Kibbe · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Education and Critical Thinking Development

paper · doi:10.1037/dev0002028

Abstract

= 96), children were asked to reason about the possible identity of an object in an event. In both experiments, we replicated previous patterns of success with future possibility reasoning, and found no differences in children's ability to reason about possible outcomes in the present versus the future. Our results suggest that the ability to navigate uncertainty across different time points may emerge together in early development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Cited by

• Understanding possibility through action: Young children’s modal reasoning in agentive contexts

Related

• Children's Thinking About Counterfactuals and Future Hypotheticals as Possibilities
• What are the odds? Preschoolers’ ability to distinguish between possible, impossible, and probabilistically distinct future outcomes.
• Preschoolers’ talk about future situations
• Not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow: Children are more open to possibility in the future than the past
• Logical Concepts of (Im)possibility Guide Young Children's Decision‐Making