Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children can be unduly skeptical of events that violate their expectations, claiming these events neither could happen nor should happen, even if the events violate no physical or social laws. Here, we explore whether children’s reasoning about possibility and permissibility—modal cognition—is aided by cognitive reflection, or the disposition to privilege analysis over intuition. Ninety-nine children between the ages of 4 and 11 judged the possibility and permissibility of several hypothetical events, and their judgments were compared to their score on a developmental version of the cognitive reflection test, the CRT-D. Children’s CRT-D scores predicted their ability to differentiate possible events from impossible ones and their ability to differentiate impermissible events from permissible ones, as well as their ability to differentiate possibility from permissibility in general. Such differentiations were predicted by children’s CRT-D scores independent of age and executive function. These findings suggest that mature modal cognition may require the ability to reflect on, and override, the intuition that unexpected events cannot happen.