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The idea that aging reduces adults' ability to imagine, a common theme in children's literature, is contradicted by psychological research. While children are often portrayed as more imaginative, research indicates that adults not only keep this ability but sometimes surpass children in imaginative thinking.

Children are frequently celebrated for boundless imagination. Yet, research reveals that their make- believe games often center around realistic scenarios, such as cooking and cleaning, as demonstrated in a 2020 study published in Journal of Cognition and Development. Another study, lasting for four decades, also suggests that children are not naturally more imaginative than adults; their limitations result from a lack of knowledge and expertise to effectively use their imaginative capacity as adults.

Imagination may have evolved for considering alternatives to reality, but we use it most naturally to explore close alternatives, like preparing a different meal, rather than far alternatives, like riding on clouds. When we use imagination to envision far alternatives- to innovate or invent- we're not digging into an inborn appreciation of the extraordinary; we're using a tool designed to explore the ordinary. When considering alternatives to reality, we fix our attention on possibilities that are physically reasonable, statistically probable, socially conventional and morally permissible. When told about possibilities that violate such regularities, we usually deny they could happen. Generally speaking, our ideas about what could happen are firmly rooted in what we expect to happen.

This mindset is also particularly apparent in young children. In a 2018 study I co-designed with psychologist Jonathan Phillips, 4-year-olds were asked to help a distressed girl who disliked going to school due to missing her mother. Among all the solutions given, they perceived the only possible solution was for her mother to do something special after school to ease her concerns. Unexpected alternatives, such as snapping fingers and making it Saturday, wearing pajamas to school or lying about school being closed, were all regarded impossible. From this, we can conclude that children's earliest intuitions (直觉力) about possibility confuse what could happen with what should happen.

Historically, the improbable event of traveling faster than a horse was considered impossible, as was traveling by air or traveling into space. Before the arrival of trains and planes, there were good reasons to think that people could travel only so far and only so fast. But these reasons were empirical (经验主义的), not logical. Imagination, on its own, lumps the improbable with the impossible, but we can combine imagination with other abilities-namely, knowledge and reflection-to separate the two. While imagination in children often subjects to expectation, adults can control their imaginative capacity for innovation by integrating it with accumulated knowledge and reflective thinking.