Imagine All the Possibilities: Toddlers Adapt to Alternative Futures

Adaptive decision making is the process of flexibly adjusting strategies and behaviors in response to changing task demands and environmental characteristics. This adaptiveness is characterized by the ability to dynamically consider multiple alternatives, update one’s approach as new information emerges, and make flexible, context-sensitive choices to meet evolving challenges. Although infants are often described as efficient and adaptive information seekers, research with preschoolers suggests that truly adaptive decision-making and possibility reasoning emerge only later in childhood. This apparent discrepancy raises important questions about how children develop the ability to integrate possibility reasoning into adaptive information search and decision-making under uncertainty. To address this gap, we designed a novel paradigm to investigate whether younger preschoolers can adjust their exploratory strategies in response to the probability structure of a task. In Experiment 1, 2- and 3-year-old children (n = 156) chose between two actions in a Search task (searching for a ball) and two boxes in a Catch task (catching a ball). Before the test, they learned about the probability structure where the ball was either more likely to come from one exit (Skewed condition) or equally likely from any exit (Uniform condition). Even 2-year-olds adjusted their strategies accordingly, choosing the large box more often in the Uniform condition and the small box in the Skewed condition. In Experiment 2 (n = 46), we replicated this finding with 2- to 4-year-olds. These results suggest that adaptive decision-making emerges as early as age 2, emphasizing the importance of designs that capture children's adaptiveness while contributing to the literature on probability reasoning.