By james art 
Even young children can distinguish between an event that is improbable and one that seems impossible. And children of this age are much more likely to remember an unimaginable event, a team reports in the diary PNAS.
“These kids are really motivated to learn,” said Lisa Feigenson, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the study.
Feigenson and Amy Stahl from the College of New Jersey conducted an experiment involving 335 2- and 3-year-old children.
“We wanted to know how young children think about possibilities,” Feigenson says.
Their first challenge was to get the attention of such young children, so the scientists designed a special chewing gum machine filled with toys.
“It turns out that being able to put a small coin in a machine and get a reward is very naturally motivating for kids,” Feigenson says.
When a toddler got a toy from the machine, scientists told them it had a made-up name: blick. They were later asked to point to blick in an array of toys.
When young children knew that the clear machine contained squirts, they were not surprised by their reward and usually forgot its name. This was true even when the machine had only one or two squirts among many other toys.
But young children reacted much differently when they received a signal from a machine that appeared to have nothing, a seemingly impossible event.
Often, “the kids’ eyes go wide, their jaws drop, and they look at their mom in surprise that this happened,” Feigenson says.
Furthermore, when young children encounter this completely unexpected result, they usually remember the name of the spout.
“There was this really big learning incentive for the kids who had seen the ‘impossible’ event,” Feigenson says.
The results add to evidence that even very young children learn better when faced with the unexpected, he says Andrew Stulmanprofessor at Occidental College, who was not involved in the study.
“It induces a level of surprise that leads to more attention, better encoding of events, and better retention of those events later,” he says.
But children are less able to distinguish improbable from impossible events when there is no physical evidence, such as unexpected blinking, Stulman says.
For example, after hearing a story that mentions eating pickle-flavored ice cream, four-year-olds will argue that it couldn’t happen in real life, Stulman says.
“Anything that violates their expectations, they deny is possible,” he says, unless they see evidence to the contrary.
Overall, this kind of research has a strong message about how young children respond to the unexpected, Stulman says.
“If you want kids to learn something deeply and for a long time,” he says, “you break their expectations before you introduce that information.”
Research shows that once children understand how an “impossible” event happened, they tend to lose interest.
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