Children’s use of reasoning by exclusion to track identities of occluded objects
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Published version
Date
2021-08
DOI
Authors
Cheng, Chen
Kibbe, Melissa M.
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
C. Cheng, M. Kibbe. 2021. "Children’s use of reasoning by exclusion to track identities of occluded objects.." Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6j69005j
Abstract
Reasoning by exclusion allows us to infer properties of
unobserved objects from currently observed objects,
formalized by P or Q, not P, therefore Q. Previous work
suggested that, by age 3, children can use this kind of reasoning
to infer the location of a hidden object after learning that
another location is empty (e.g. Mody & Carey, 2016). In the
current study, we asked whether children could use reasoning
by exclusion to infer the identities of previously unobserved
occluded objects in a task that required them to track the
locations of multiple occluded objects. Forty-nine 4-7-yearolds
viewed animated arrays of virtual “cards” depicting
images which were then hidden by occluders. The occluders
then swapped locations during the maintenance period.
Children were asked to select which card was hidden in a
probed location. During the encoding period, we manipulated
whether children saw all the card faces (Face-up block) or all
but one of the card faces (Exclusion block), for which children
had to reason by exclusion to infer the target in half of the trials.
We found that all children succeeded in the Face-up block, but
only 6-year-olds succeed in the Exclusion block when they had
to deploy logical reasoning to identify a previously-unseen
hidden target. Our results suggest that children’s ability to
reason by exclusion to infer the identity of a hidden target while
tracking multiple objects and locations may undergo protracted
development.
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