In our lab meeting this week, we discussed Shtulman and Carey's (2007) paper, "Improbable or Impossible? How Children Reason About the Possibility of Extraordinary Events." Their study investigated whether children and adults judge events (possible, improbable and impossible ones) as possible or impossible. They found that children judged improbable events as impossible. Shtulman and Carey explained that this is because children mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur as evidence that it does not exist.
Shtulman, A. & Carey, S. (2007). Improbable or Impossible? How Children Reason About the Possibility of Extraordinary Events. Child Development, 78(3), 1015-1032.
