Do older 2-year-olds deploy explicit possibility concepts in action planning?

Many studies find that young preschoolers do not deploy logical concepts like OR or POSSIBLY in the 3- and 4-container tasks. Gautam et al. (2021) report a modified 4-container task, where children with an age range of 2;6–3;0 perform as well as 5-year-olds on previous studies. Performance demands of earlier implementations might have masked children's logical competence. Here we replicate that result, but also find that it does not hold when the simpler 3-container task is implemented with the same modifications. When children are given more trials on the 4-container task, performance converges to that observed in all other implementations. The 3- and 4-container tasks equally test whether participants differentiate a container where a reward is from a container where a reward might or might not be. Their failure to deploy this distinction on the 3-container task speaks against the hypothesis that the modifications in Gautam et al. unmasked an ability to differentiate what is from what merely might be on the 4-container task.