This project from a team led by Stephanie Denison at the University of Waterloo will follow a multi-disciplinary approach to examining the developmental origins of reasoning about multiple possibilities — an ability foundational to intellectual humility, curiosity, and belief revision.

Children’s capacity to consider and act upon multiple possibilities is critical to cognitive flexibility and lifelong learning, yet little is known about how these skills emerge and develop. This research addresses significant gaps by investigating the complex interplay between cognitive capacities, social environments, and individual tendencies. It focuses on identifying the factors that shape this development in early childhood (infant to 4 years old) and how they interact to drive individual differences in reasoning under uncertainty.

The team’s pilot data suggests that the ability to hold and reason over multiple possibilities emerges early in life and may contribute to metacognitive development. Characterizing this capacity further requires measuring children’s environmental experiences and building computational models tested against behavioral and neurological evidence.

The team will use a three-pronged interdisciplinary approach, combining neurological measures (EEG), behavioral tasks (search and explicit reasoning), and computational modeling (at computational and algorithmic levels). Each component also incorporates individual variability and environmental factors to explore how children manage uncertainty.

The team hypothesizes that children’s reasoning across modal and probabilistic domains emerges early, but difficulties integrating these representations with action and reflection may contribute to later developmental challenges. Individual differences are expected to be shaped by both dispositional traits (e.g., uncertainty tolerance) and environmental conditions, and the team aims to characterize the role of both across development.

Understanding these factors may help explain why adult reasoning varies widely in open-mindedness, creativity, and intellectual humility.The goal of the work is to provide a comprehensive picture based on neurological, behavioral, and computational evidence that are often tackled by separate research groups, and thus difficult to integrate.