Dr Jonathan Redshaw | On cognitive uncertainty and reasoning about possibilities

Many developmental psychologists assume that an understanding of mutually exclusive possibilities is central to the emergence of sophisticated human reasoning and decision-making. But non-human animals also show sensitivity to such possibilities in decision-making tasks, so what could be special about the human case? Drawing on analogies with classic perceptual phenomena, I will suggest that animals (and young children) tend to explicitly represent one possible world state while implicitly tracking other possible world states in situations of uncertainty. In the perceptual case of binocular rivalry, the brain maintains evidence for two percepts but only one percept reaches awareness. In the representational case of mutually exclusive possibilities, the brain likewise maintains evidence for multiple world states but only one world state is explicitly represented. On this view, cognitive uncertainty can still function as an internal stimulus driving information seeking and learning in animals, all the while only one representation dominates at the level of phenomenology. Humans, by contrast, can meta-represent that their dominant representation of the world is just a representation, and thus reason about the relationships between alternative representations of the world. I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this account in explaining findings from developmental and comparative psychology.