Esra Nur Turan-Küçük

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük

@esranur.bsky.social

Post-doc @Harvard, PhD in Developmental Science from Boston University, exploring how young minds make sense of the world, Fulbright scholar 🔗 www.esraturankucuk.com

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük reposted

Society for Philosophy and Psychology
@socphilpsych.bsky.social

Children’s representations of possibility: Uncertainty about “what” is easier than uncertainty about “where” 
‼️From Esra Nur Turan-Küçük & Melissa M. Kibbe

doi.orgChildren’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general li...

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük reposted

Open Mind
@openmindjournal.bsky.social

Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”

direct.mit.eduChildren’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general…
Esra Nur Turan-Küçük
@esranur.bsky.social

6/ The telling pattern: strip one of those demands out of a task, and younger kids suddenly succeed. Add one back in, and success rates drop. That's not noise, it's a signature of how much a task is asking beyond "is this possible, or is it necessary?"

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük
@esranur.bsky.social

7/ This won't settle exactly when possibility reasoning "emerges." But it gives the field a sharper question to ask first: what else is this task demanding of a child, before we draw conclusions about what they understand?

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük
@esranur.bsky.social

4/ Here's the puzzle. Give young children two tests with the exact same logical structure — one outcome is guaranteed, the others are merely possible — and the same child can breeze through one and flounder on the other. Same logic, wildly different performance. Why?

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük
@esranur.bsky.social

5/ Our answer: no task measures possibility reasoning in isolation. Every task also asks the child to do other things, track hidden objects, predict where a falling ball will go, coordinate two hands at once, parse a tricky question. A 3-year-old is still developing all of those skills too.

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük
@esranur.bsky.social

2/ We analyzed the field's most widely used possibility-reasoning tasks and identified five hidden demands stacked on top of the actual question: physical reasoning, action planning, working memory, language, and temporal context.

Esra Nur Turan-Küçük
@esranur.bsky.social

3/ When do children start reasoning about what could happen vs. what must happen? Depending on which study you read, the answer is anywhere from infancy to age 5+. We argue much of that disagreement isn't about kids at all — it's about everything else our tasks quietly demand of them.

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Esra Nur Turan-Küçük
@esranur.bsky.social

To test this, we adapted the 4-cups task (Mody & Carey, 2016) with 138 2-to-4-year-olds, and at every age, children were more accurate under identity uncertainty than location uncertainty. Whether uncertainty is about what something is or where it is shapes what young children can reason about.

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