Object perception encodes mutually exclusive possibilities

Human adults represent and reason about possibilities: multiple, mutually exclusive, nonactual ways the world could be. It is debated whether this is a late-developing, human-specific capacity and whether it requires natural language. We propose that instead of a unitary high-level capacity, multiple cognitive capacities might independently represent possibilities in different ways and with different properties. Our case study is object perception, a capacity shared with infants and nonhuman animals. Using methods that tap specifically into visual processes, across four experiments (N = 160), we found possibility representations in vision tasks that do not involve high-level reasoning or language. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found evidence for the visual encoding of possible object identities: When there were two possible ways that features might map onto visual objects, both possible mappings were primed. In Experiment 3, we found that visual feature binding is a necessary precondition for such priming, ruling out low-level associative and high-level reasoning-based alternatives. Finally, in Experiment 4, we discovered that the visual system cannot encode one visual object possibly being at two possible locations. This pattern helps to explain a host of previous findings from the comparative and developmental literature and suggests that the unit of analysis for possibility representations should be the cognitive capacity rather than the agent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).