Choosing between two objects reduces 3-year-olds’ errors on a reverse-contingency test of executive function

In the present experiment, we used a reversed-contingency paradigm (the windows task: [Russell, J., Mauthner, N., Sharpe, S., & Tidswell, T. (1991). The windows task as a measure of strategic deception in preschoolers and autistic subjects. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 331–349]) to explore the effect of alterations in the task array on 3-year-old children’s strategic reasoning. Children were offered a choice between either a desirable object and an undesirable object, or between a desirable object and an empty location. There was significantly better performance on the two-object version of the task. This difference was evident even on subsequent trials when the second object was removed and the empty location reintroduced. This suggests that presenting children with a choice between two objects helps them to formulate a strategy, rather than to execute a previously determined response.