The scope and role of deduction in infant cognition

The origins of the human capacity for logically structured thought are still a mystery. Studies on young humans, which can be particularly informative, present conflicting results. Infants seem able to generate competing hypotheses^1,2,3 and monitor the certainty or probability of one-shot outcomes,^4,5,6,7,8 suggesting the existence of an articulated language of thought.⁹ However, sometimes toddlers¹⁰ and even children younger than 4^11,12,13,14 fail tasks seemingly requiring the same representational abilities. One fundamental test for the presence of logical abilities is the concept of disjunction as a way into the conception of alternative possibilities, and of disjunctive elimination as a way to prune them. Here, we document their widespread presence in 19-month-old infants. In a word-referent association task, both bilingual and monolingual infants display a pattern of oculomotor inspection previously found to be a hallmark of disjunctive reasoning in adults and children,^15,16 showing that the onset of logical reasoning is not crucially dependent on language experience. The pattern appears when targets are novel, but also when both objects and words are known, though likely not yet sedimented into a mature lexicon. Disjunctive reasoning also surfaces in a non-linguistic location search task, not prompted by violated expectations, showing that infants reason by elimination spontaneously. Together, these results help answer long-standing empirical and philosophical puzzles about the role of logic in early knowledge development, suggesting that by increasing confidence in some options while eliminating alternatives, logic provides scaffolding for the organization of knowledge about the world, language, and language-world relations.