Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The capacity for representing and reasoning over sets of possibilities, or modal cognition, has long been understoodas central to many high level judgments. To date, however, little empirical research has sought to directly investigate theconnection between these high-level judgments and the underlying cognition that allows humans to represent and reason oversets of possibilities. The present studies build on previous developmental research which suggests that the early emergingsystem for modal cognition treats norm-violations (e.g., immoral actions) as impossible. Across two studies, we provideevidence that a similar system for representing possibilities persists in human adults, despite the development of an additionalcapacity for reasoning about possibilities in a way that is independent of considerations of normality. Study 1 distinguishesbetween these two ways of representing possibilities. Study 2 demonstrates that the early-emerging system is often recruitedwhen adults make high-level cognitive judgments.