Mody and Carey (2016) investigated children's capacity to reason by the disjunctive syllogism by hiding stickers within two pairs of cups (i.e., there is one sticker in cup A or B, and one in cup C or D) and then showing one cup to be empty. They found that children as young as 3 years of age chose the most likely cup (i.e., not A, therefore choose B; and disregard C and D) and suggested that these children were representing the (...) dependent relationship between A and B by applying the logical operator “or”. However, it is possible that children succeeded using simpler strategies, such as avoiding the empty cup and choosing within the manipulated pair. We devised a new version of the task in which a sticker was visibly removed from one of the four cups so that 2.5- to 5-year-old children (N = 100) would fail if they relied on such strategies. We also included a conceptual replication of Mody and Carey's (2016) original condition. Our results replicated their findings and showed that even younger children, 2.5 years of age, could pass above chance levels. Yet, 2.5-, 3- and 4-year-olds failed the new condition. Only 5-year-old children performed above chance in both conditions and so provided compelling evidence of deductive reasoning from the premise “A or B", where “or” is exclusive. We propose that younger children may instead conceive of the relationship between A and B as inclusive “or” across both versions of the task. (shrink)

Recent research has provided compelling evidence that children experience the negative counterfactual emotion of regret, by manipulating the presence of a counterfactual action that would have led to participants receiving a better outcome. However, it remains unclear if children similarly experience regret’s positive counterpart, relief. The current study examined children’s negative and positive counterfactual emotions in a novel gain-or-loss context. Four- to 9-year-old children (N = 136) were presented with two opaque boxes concealing information that would lead to a gain (...) or loss of stickers, respectively. Half of the children chose between two keys that matched each box, whereas the other half were compelled to select one box because only one of the two keys matched. After seeing inside the alternative, non-chosen box, children were significantly more likely to report a change in emotion when they could have opened that box than when they could not have. The effects were similar for children who lost stickers and won stickers, and neither effect varied with age. These findings suggest that children may become capable of experiencing regret and relief around the same time, although their expression of these counterfactual emotions may vary with actual and counterfactual gains and losses. (shrink)

With the rise of wearable technologies, mobile devices and artificial intelligence comes a growing pressure to understand downstream effects of cognitive offloading on children's future thinking and behavior. Here, we explored whether compelling children to use an indiscriminate cognitive offloading strategy affects their subsequent strategy selection. Six‐ to 9‐year‐olds (N = 128) completed a task where manual rotation of stimuli sometimes offloaded mental rotation demand and other times did not. In phase 1, some children were compelled to use manual rotation (...) indiscriminately, whereas others could only use mental rotation. In phase 2, where children could freely choose their strategy, older children who were compelled to use manual rotation in phase 1 were significantly more selective in their strategy use, rotating the stimuli relatively more frequently when this behavior would offload cognitive demand than when it would not. These results provide preliminary evidence that pre‐exposure to indiscriminate cognitive offloading can promote selectivity in children's subsequent strategy use, though this selectivity may reflect a desire to avoid cognitive effort rather than improve task performance. (shrink)

Hoerl & McCormack discuss the possible function of meta-representations in temporal cognition but ultimately take an agnostic stance. Here we outline the fundamental role that we believe meta-representations play. Because humans know that their representations of future events are just representations, they are in a position to compensate for the shortcomings of their own foresight and to prepare for multiple contingencies.

Mahr & Csibra (M&C) fail to make the important distinction between why a trait originally evolved, why it was maintained over time, and what its current utility is. Here we point out that episodic memory may have originally evolved as a by-product of a general metarepresentational capacity, and that it may have current functions beyond the communicative domain.

Research suggests that reasoning about occluded objects, reality monitoring, and especially planning develop relatively late in children, and are capacities not universally shared with other land animals. F&M’s proposal needs to more clearly delineate their use of these concepts to avoid misunderstandings about what they see as essential for the evolution of conscious vision.