Do older 2-year-olds deploy explicit possibility concepts in action planning?

Many preschoolers do not deploy logical concepts like OR or POSSIBLY in the 3- and 4-container tasks, even at age 4. Gautam et al. (2021) report that with procedural changes, children with an age range of 2;6 to 3;0 perform well on the 4-container task, suggesting that performance demands of earlier implementations might have masked children’s logical competence. Here we replicate that result, but show it holds only on the first 2 trials of the task, after which performance is the same as all other implementations in the literature. Moreover, older 2-year-olds fail on the simpler 3-container task even with those procedural changes. Children’s success in Gautam et al.’s 4-container trials does not reflect the deployment of OR or POSSIBLY.