No evidence for a developmental asymmetry between reasoning under physical and epistemic uncertainty in young children
Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: When confronted with alternative possibilities, we experience different kinds of uncertainty: with physical uncertainty the outcome has yet to happen, while with epistemic uncertainty the outcome has happened, but is unknown. Previous work suggests an asymmetry in acquisition: children prepare for physically uncertainty prior to epistemic uncertainty (Robinson et al., 2006). Several theoretical accounts build on this purported developmental asymmetry (e.g., Beck et al., 2012; Gautam et al., 2019; Phillips & Kratzer, 2024), with some arguing that representing epistemic uncertainty may require additional meta-cognitive abilities (Phillips & Kratzer, 2024) and others suggesting links to children’s developing Theory of Mind (Gautam et al., 2019). The present studies tested the robustness of this developmental asymmetry and its proposed relation to Theory of Mind. Across two studies (N = 202, 3- to 6-year-old German-speaking children, 95 female, 107 male), we investigated whether young children treat physical and epistemic uncertainty differently when preparing for incompatible possibilities in closely matched minimal contrast pairs of uncertainty conditions. We further explored whether children’s performance in the uncertainty task was related to their first- and second-order false belief understanding. Across both studies, we found no differences between uncertainty conditions: children did not prepare differently for physically and epistemically uncertain events. Moreover, performance in the uncertainty task was not positively correlated with Theory of Mind. Our findings stand in empirical tension with previous findings and in conceptual tension with recent theoretical work on the development of modal cognition.
Authors: Leonie Baumann, Lydia Paulin Schidelko, Christina Schneider, Marina Proft, Tanya Behne, hannes rakoczy
Institution: University of Göttingen
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4413066168