Children’s reasoning about possible outcomes of events in the present and the future

When making decisions, we often must consider multiple alternative outcomes of events that will happen in the future, or events that have already happened but the outcome is unknown. How do children navigate uncertainty across different points in time? Here, we tested several developmental hypotheses for children’s ability to reason about possibilities in the present and in the future. In two experiments (n = 192, US 3- and 4-year-olds), children were asked to prepare for two mutually exclusive possible outcomes of an event that either will occur in the future (Future condition) or that had already occurred but the outcome was currently unknown (Present condition). In Experiment 1 (n = 96), children were asked to reason about the possible location of an object in an event. In Experiment 2 (n = 96), children were asked to reason about the possible identity of an object in an event. In both experiments, we replicated previous patterns of success with future possibility reasoning, and found no differences in children’s ability to reason about possible outcomes in the present versus the future. Our results suggest that the ability to navigate uncertainty across different timepoints may emerge together in early development.