Abstract

That conditional, if-then reasoning does not emerge until 4–5 years has long been accepted. Here we show that children barely 3 years old can do conditional reasoning. All that was needed was a superficial change to the stimuli: When color was a property of the shapes rather than of the background, 3-year-olds could succeed. Three-year-olds do not seem to use color to inform them which shape is correct unless color is a property of the shapes themselves. While CD requires integrating color and shape information, the dimensional change card sort task requires keeping those dimension cognitively separate – inhibiting attention to one when sorting by the other. For DCCS, a superficial change to the stimuli that is the inverse of what helps on CD enables 3-year-olds to succeed when normally they do not until ∼4⁤12 years. As we and others have previously shown, 3-year-olds can succeed at DCCS when color is a property of the background, instead of a property of the stimulus. Our findings on CD and DCCS suggest that scaffolding preschoolers’ emerging conceptual skills by changing the way stimuli look enables 3-year-olds to demonstrate reasoning abilities long thought beyond their grasp. Evidently, children of 3 years have difficulty mentally separating dimensions of the same object and difficulty mentally integrating dimensions not part of the same object. Our present CD findings plus our earlier DCCS findings provide strong evidence against prominent cognitive complexity, conditional reasoning, and graded memory theories for why 3-year-olds fail these two tasks. The ways we have traditionally queried children may have obscured the budding reasoning competencies present at 3 years of age.