Conservation experiments are at the heart of Piaget’s theory that young children are easily misled by appearances and fail to acknowledge the stability of reality. An independent line of research on the development of counterfactual thinking suggests that children struggle to imagine how the world would be if specific events had not occurred. Although seemingly unrelated, we proposed that counterfactual thinking may play a role in mentally reversing changes in conservation tasks. The present study examined whether children’s counterfactual thinking predicts their performance on conservation problems. Forty-eight children between 6 and 8 years old completed conservation and counterfactual thinking tasks online. Results showed that children’s performance on the counterfactual thinking task significantly predicted their performance on the conservation task. Age also significantly predicted children’s performance on both tasks. The findings suggest that there is a so-far undetected involvement of counterfactual thinking in understanding the principle of conservation.

Children are keen explorers of the world: They systematically explore surprising findings and test hypotheses during play. However, less is known about whether toddlers are similarly driven to learn about the self. Here, we ask whether toddlers are intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence. In ongoing work, 2-year-olds (N = 12) play Montessori practical life games along with their parents; toys were verified to be equally appealing and challenging to toddlers in an independent norming experiment (N = 14). Within each pair, parents guide the toddler's hands while playing with one toy, which provides ambiguous information about the toddler's competence, and take turns playing with the other toy independently, which provides unambiguous information. Toddlers are then offered both toys to freely explore independently. Preliminary results show that toddlers explored the ambiguous toy first in 71% of the 31 trials, suggesting that toddlers seek out opportunities to learn about their competence.