current research

Did you find it easy or hard to answer these questions? 

What did you think about when you answered them?

There are lots of different ways that people might go about thinking about the possibility of things. They might think about how things could happen. They might think about whether similar things have happened before. They might think about whether it would be right or wrong for these things to happen. They might think about whether these things would make the world a better or worse place.

We try to figure out how people reason about the possibility of events. We also want to understand how beliefs about possibility change with age, and whether kids and adults use different strategies to think about possibilities.

People find it hard to think about what the future will be like. And they find it really hard to think about their own futures. People often think that they've changed a lot to become who they are today, but that they probably won't change very much in the future.

What do people think about when they try to predict the future? Do they try to imagine what the future will be like? Do they think about how much change usually happens over time? When they think about what they'll be like when they're older, do they think about what other people usually like?

We want to know the kinds of things people think about when they think about their futures. We want to understand the mental abilities people need to imagine and predict what the future will be like, and how those abilities develop across childhood.

People are really good at thinking about the order of things across time. When you're in line at the grocery store, you know that the person in front will get checked in next. When you're told that someone came last in a race, you know that everybody else finished before them.

But you can do more complicated things, too. If someone showed you some fallen dominoes, you could guess where the chain started and where it ended. And if a child showed you that they've been marking their height on a doorframe as they get older, you'd guess that the lowest mark is the oldest and the highest mark is the newest. And you'd probably guess that the next mark would be even higher.

We want to know how people reason about the order of events across time. We also want to learn whether very young children can reconstruct the past and predict the future, just like adults.