Many thanks to my co-author and advisor @levelsof.bsky.social and all the families who participated!
Preprint is available here: osf.io/preprints/ps...
To test this, we adapted the 4-cups task (Mody & Carey, 2016) with 138 2-to-4-year-olds, and at every age, children were more accurate under identity uncertainty than location uncertainty. Whether uncertainty is about what something is or where it is shapes what young children can reason about.
Our hypothesis is that object indexes (Leslie et al., 1998) represent location necessarily, but identity only optionally (Kibbe & Leslie, 2011), so indexes should be able to carry uncertainty about identity but not about location.
This is going to be an incredible event celebrating Alan Leslie's amazing career. Speakers include Susan Carey, Lisa Feigenson, Randy Gallistel, Ori Friedman, Zsuzsa Káldy, Ágnes Kovács, Sydney Levine, Sandeep Prasada, Brian Scholl, Luca Surian (and me!) Join in person at Rutgers or livestream
Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future
📣 Work by Esra N. Turan-Küçük & Melissa M. Kibbe
You can access the paper from our website as well www.bu.edu/cdl/files/20...
New paper in Open Mind! 2-to-4-year-olds find it easier to reason about an object's possible identity than its possible location, and we argue this asymmetry traces back to the architecture of early object representations. 🧵
🥁Now announcing the winner of the 2026 Stanton Prize:
Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social!
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
This honor will be celebrated at the upcoming meeting of the SPP
New from me and @esranur.bsky.social! In two exps with 3-4-year-olds, we find no differences in kids' reasoning about possible outcomes of an event in different temporal contexts; kids perform the same under physical and epistemic uncertainty psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #devpsy #psychscisky