Find the candy

4-year-olds

Your child will be introduced to two characters, Benny the Bear and Ruby the Rabbit. The goal of the game will be for your child to find the candy that Benny hides. Benny will first show your child that he can hide candy in a truck, a house, and a bucket. Then, an occluder will cover the locations and Benny will hide the candy. Ruby will then ask Benny questions about where he hid the candy, and Benny will give clues about the candy's location. It will then be your child's turn to guess where Benny hid the candy.

We are interested in how children learn logical terms like "and", "or", and "not". Particularly, we are interested in whether children are able to compose these terms, being able to understand a sentence like "I do not want the pasta or the pizza." Thus, we want to know if children can understand the compositions of these terms at the earliest age at which they understand the terms individually. While we have good knowledge of children understanding "not" by 2.5 years old, it is unclear when children distinguish between "and" and "or". Our first study's aim is to establish this age of acquisition by seeing if children respond differently to Benny's clues if he says "or" vs. "and".

20 minutes

We will email families a $5 Amazon.com gift card within a week of the study (one per child), provided the child was in the specified age range and was visible at some point during the study.