Are counterfactuals in and about time?

Abstract

We discuss whether the two systems approach can advance understanding of children's developing counterfactual thinking. We argue that types of counterfactual thinking that are acquired early in development could be handled by the temporal updating system, whereas those that emerge in middle childhood require thinking about specific events in time.

Getting counterfactuals right: the perspective of the causal reasoner

“…Children below 6 would incorrectly say that the nut would be in the village. Beck and Rafetseder (2019) explain the discrepancy between the results in the studies above, as well as the split between views attributing counterfactual thought to younger or older children through Hoerl and McCormack's (2019) dual systems account of temporal updating and temporal reasoning. For temporal reasoning, the child has to run a simulation of a past event, which is required in the McCormack et al (2018) study.…”

“…By contrast, in Nyhout and Ganea (2019) the screen still shows both blocks on top of the device and children have to only think of what would happen if one of the blocks were removed. Beck and Rafetseder (2019) take this to involve merely temporal updating, which is present earlier in development. While one may object that the preemption scenario may be too complex and thus not representative for assessing children's causal reasoning, the issue with the experiments in Nyhout and Ganea is that they do not require children to consider things having gone differently in the past.…”

The subject of children’s counterfactual thoughts.

“…McCormack and Nyhout's tasks led to the difference in success being reported at 6 and 4 years respectively. But a different explanation has been proposed by Beck and Rafetseder (2019) using Hoerl and McCormack's (2019) dual systems theory of temporal cognition.…”

“…It is certainly possible that the difference in complexity of the scenarios used in McCormack and Nyhout’s tasks led to the difference in success being reported at 6 and 4 years, respectively. But a different explanation has been proposed by Beck and Rafetseder (2019) using Hoerl and McCormack’s (2019) dual systems theory of temporal cognition. Hoerl and McCormack argued that there are two systems for thinking about time.…”

“…In Nyhout and Ganea's blicket detector task, one might take correct answers to the doubly determined counterfactual question as showing that children are thinking back in time to the point when two causal blocks (red and green) were placed on the machine, and entertaining a counterfactual antecedent that the red block was not included in that past event. However, Beck and Rafetseder (2019) suggested that children may be able to give the correct answer to the Nyhout and Ganea blicket detector question using only the temporal updating system: that is, by updating their current world model in which there are two causal bocks on the machine to a model in which one of these blocks is removed. This update could be conceived in one of two ways (see Figure 1): (a) children could consider what would happen if the red block were removed now from the blicket detector, if we "added" new information to the model.…”