In order to learn from metaphors, children must not only be able to understand metaphors, but also appreciate their relative informativeness. Although functional metaphors based on abstract commonalities (e.g. “Eyes are windows”) allow for more learning than perceptual metaphors based on superficial commonalities (e.g. “Eyes are buttons”), previous research shows that preschoolers prefer perceptual metaphors over functional metaphors. In the present studies, we ask whether providing additional context can shift metaphor preferences in preschoolers and adults. Experiment 1 finds that pedagogical context increases preferences for functional metaphors in adults, but not preschoolers. Experiment 2 finds that providing explanations for conceptual similarities in a metaphor increases preschoolers’ preferences for functional metaphors. These findings suggest that providing explanations allows even preschoolers to appreciate the informativeness of functional metaphors.

Research on the development of future hypothetical andcounterfactual thinking suggests that children as old as fivemay be unable to consider multiple, equally probablepossibilities simultaneously. Yet, a large literature on thedevelopment of causal reasoning suggests that much youngerchildren are able to generate, evaluate, and test causalhypotheses, often by integrating information about severalcandidate causes at once. The current research seeks to bridgethese two bodies of research. In three experiments, adults andtoddlers (18–30 months) observe a sequence of evidence thatis equally consistent with two hypotheses, each occupying adifferent level of abstraction (individual vs. relational).Results suggest that learners generate more than one potentialcause, hold both in mind, and flexibly apply the appropriatehypothesis to inform their inferences at test. Findingschallenge previous suggestions that much older children failto consider multiple, equally probable possibilities.

Previous work suggests that children’s ability to understand metaphors emerges late in development. Researchers argue that children’s initial failure to understand metaphors is due to an inability to reason about shared relational structures between concepts. However, recent work demonstrates that causal framing facilitates preschoolers’ relational reasoning. Might causal framing also facilitate preschoolers’ metaphor comprehension? In Experiment 1, we presented 128 4- to 5-year-olds with a novel metaphor comprehension task, following a causal warm-up task, control warm-up task, or no warm-up task. In the novel comprehension task, preschoolers rated functional metaphors and nonsense statements as smart or silly, and provided explanations. Preschoolers ranked metaphors as “smarter” than nonsense statements, and a quarter of preschoolers provided functional explanations. There was no effect of warm-up tasks. In Experiment 2, we validated the metaphor comprehension task with adults. Overall, the current work presents a new paradigm that demonstrates preschoolers’ capacity to understand functional metaphors.

A large literature on the development of causal reasoningcharacterizes early childhood as a period of curiosity,exploration, and experimentation. This suggests that a noveltypreference may be a universal hallmark of early causallearning. Functionally, such a bias might serve to directattention towards new opportunities for knowledge gain. Analternative possibility is that a preference for exploring noveloutcomes develops over time. In three experiments with 2- to5-year-olds, we investigate the developmental trajectory ofchildren’s preference for causal processes that producereliable versus novel outcomes. We find evidence for adevelopmental shift between ages 2 and 3: while two-year-olds trend toward a preference for reliable over noveloutcomes, older children clearly prefer novel ones. Wediscuss possible adaptive reasons for this developmental shift.

The ability to infer general characteristics of populations from specific instances is critical for reasoning. While there is evidence of this capacity in infancy, prior work has not examined children’s ability to use these second-order inferences to make predictions about future outcomes. In the current study, 3-year-olds observed balls drawn at random from two containers. In one sample each ball was a different color. The other sample consisted of balls of only one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) colors. Children were asked which of the containers was more likely to contain a novel colored ball. A significant majority of children chose the more variable sample’s container. This suggests that 3-year-olds are not only able to make inferences about hidden populations from the variability of observed samples, but also use those inferences to reason beyond their direct experience.

Young children rapidly infer causal relations by trackingcontingencies between causes and their effects, and cangeneralize these rules to novel instances of the same cause.However, this is distinct from the ability to make inferencesabout whether a particular cause is likely to produce noveleffects. Here, we investigate the development of two-, three-,and four-year-olds’ ability to recognize and use informationabout a cause’s variability to make predictions about othernovel outcomes it might produce. Experiment 1 finds thatchildren as young as two years of age infer that a cause thathas produced variable, rather than deterministic outcomes ismore likely to produce a novel, previously unobserved effect.Experiment 2 finds that four-year-olds, but not two- andthree-year-olds, infer that a higher variability cause is morelikely to produce a novel outcome than a lower variabilitycause.

Decades of work exploring the development of children's analogical reasoning illustrates that 3- and 4-year-old children struggle with reasoning by analogy (i.e. glove:hand::sock:___), almost always preferring superficially related “object matches” (:shoe) over “relational matches” (:foot). However, one recent study demonstrated preschoolers' ability to choose relational matches when a traditional relational-match-to-sample task is embedded in causal scaffolding, framing the target abstract relation as one between beginning and ending states of a causal transformation. Current work aims to discover which factors of causal framing facilitate this boost in early abstract reasoning. In Study 1, we replicate this effect while adapting the transformation to involve two objects, showing that preservation of identity is not necessary for analogical reasoning in a causal context. In Study 2, we explore the replicated effect in a case of non-agentive causation, finding that the causal boost, while still present, is significantly weaker when scaffolding involves a machine vs. an agent. These findings demonstrate that causal framing can be a powerful tool in bolstering children's early abstract reasoning capabilities and show that this enhancing effect is even stronger when an agent holds causal power.

Previously, research on wishful thinking has found that desires bias older children's and adults' predictions during probabilistic reasoning tasks. In this article, we explore wishful thinking in children aged 3- to 10-years-old. Do young children learn to be wishful thinkers? Or do they begin with a wishful thinking bias that is gradually overturned during development? Across five experiments, we compare low- and middle-income United States and Peruvian 3- to 10-year-old children (N = 682). Children were asked to make predictions during games of chance. Across experiments, preschool-aged children from all backgrounds consistently displayed a strong wishful thinking bias. However, the bias declined with age.

When facing uncertainty, humans often build mental models of alternative outcomes. Considering diverging scenarios allows agents to respond adaptively to different actual worlds by developing contingency plans (covering one's bases). In a pre-registered experiment, we tested whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) prepare for two mutually exclusive possibilities. Chimpanzees could access two pieces of food, but only if they successfully protected them from a human competitor. In one condition, chimpanzees could be certain about which piece of food the human experimenter would attempt to steal. In a second condition, either one of the food rewards was a potential target of the competitor. We found that chimpanzees were significantly more likely to protect both pieces of food in the second relative to the first condition, raising the possibility that chimpanzees represent and prepare effectively for different possible worlds.