Toddlers can easily imagine what an object might be but they are completely unable to imagine where it might be.
Young children possess a specific logical blind spot regarding the location of objects. A two-year-old understands that a hidden toy could be a ball or a block. That same child cannot grasp the possibility that a ball could be in either the blue box or the red box. Their logic systems process identity and location as two entirely separate categories of possibility. This developmental gap explains why hide-and-seek feels so impossible for very young children to master.
Successful Modal Reasoning Depends On WHAT Went WHERE
PsyArXiv · r3qmg_v1
Quantifying over possibilities requires Modal Reasoning (e.g., categorizing events as necessary, possible, and impossible). This suite of abilities matures during the preschool years, but toddlers succeed at reasoning in some possibility tasks and fail at others. We propose that these mixed findings reflect a cognitive distinction: toddlers fail when tested about ambiguous locations of objects (WHERE), and succeed when tested about ambiguous identities of objects (WHAT). In Experiment 1 and 2, w