Abstract
Prior research on modal thought has yielded conflicting findings regarding children’s ability to represent mutually exclusive possibilities. While some studies suggest that even infants and non-human animals understand possibilities to some degree, older children struggle in experimental paradigms that require them to consider multiple alternatives. In the 3-cups-task, for instance, they fail to systematically prefer a certain reward (in A) over two uncertain options (in B or C). This has been taken as evidence for that children below age 4 lack genuinely modal representations of possibility. However, recent metacognitive research suggests that already three-year-old children can recognize epistemic uncertainty about possible, mutually exclusive object identities (X or Y). So, why do 3-year-olds metacognitively acknowledge their ignorance in some contexts, but obviously fail to do so in trying to solve the 3-cups task? We addressed this question in three preregistered experiments (N = 278 three-year-old children) in which we investigated whether details of the task pragmatics, question format or the contents of the uncertainty judgments pose specific performance factors in the 3-cups-task. There was no clear evidence that task pragmatics or question format per se explain these difficulties. But there was strong evidence that the content of the uncertainty judgments matters: Children found it much more difficult to represent uncertainty where an object is (in cups B or C) than to represent uncertainty which of two objects (X or Y) was in a given box. These results converge with other recent findings to suggest a fundamental where/what asymmetry in children’s early modal reasoning and raise crucial questions about the robustness of early modal competence.