Cognitive neuroscience of human counterfactual reasoning

Hoeck, Nicole eVan; Watson, Patrick D.; Barbey, Aron K.

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00420

Cited by 84 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 255 publications

(401 reference statements)

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“…Interaction terms for SRP-III*agent counterfactual and SRP-III*obtained outcome were included in the same model, to examine the incremental effect of the counterfactual outcome over and above the obtained outcome. In keeping with prior work (26,30,35), we considered rating 1 and rating 2 to reflect reported disappointment and regret, respectively. Decision making.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Psychopathic individuals exhibit but do not avoid regret during counterfactual decision making

Baskin‐Sommers

Stuppy-Sullivan

Buckholtz

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Psychopathy is associated with persistent antisocial behavior and a striking lack of regret for the consequences of that behavior. Although explanatory models for psychopathy have largely focused on deficits in affective responsiveness, recent work indicates that aberrant value-based decision making may also play a role. On that basis, some have suggested that psychopathic individuals may be unable to effectively use prospective simulations to update action value estimates during cost-benefit decision making. However, the specific mechanisms linking valuation, affective deficits, and maladaptive decision making in psychopathy remain unclear. Using a counterfactual decision-making paradigm, we found that individuals who scored high on a measure of psychopathy were as or more likely than individuals low on psychopathy to report negative affect in response to regret-inducing counterfactual outcomes. However, despite exhibiting intact affective regret sensitivity, they did not use prospective regret signals to guide choice behavior. In turn, diminished behavioral regret sensitivity predicted a higher number of prior incarcerations, and moderated the relationship between psychopathy and incarceration history. These findings raise the possibility that maladaptive decision making in psychopathic individuals is not a consequence of their inability to generate or experience negative emotions. Rather, antisocial behavior in psychopathy may be driven by a deficit in the generation of forward models that integrate information about rules, costs, and goals with stimulus value representations to promote adaptive behavior.psychopathy | counterfactual reasoning | affect | decision making | reward T he ability to establish, transmit, and enforce social norms is a signature of our species. Indeed, maintaining our uniquely high degree of stable, large-scale cooperation requires widespread norm compliance (1). However, although norm compliance is common, it is far from universal. Throughout history and across cultures, there have been those who would threaten social peace and community prosperity through their persistent violation of social norms. Psychopathic individuals, who exhibit a chronic and flagrant disregard for moral and legal norms, exemplify this type of person. Compared with nonpsychopathic individuals, they commit two to three times more violent and nonviolent crime and recidivate at a much higher rate (2). This persistent antisocial behavior comes at a high cost to society, with psychopathic individuals responsible for a disproportionate share of the estimated $2.34 trillion in annual costs associated with crime in the United States (3).Psychopathy is defined by a combination of superficial charm, blunted empathy and punishment sensitivity, shallow emotional experiences, persistent antisocial behavior, and marked sensation seeking and impulsivity (2). Whereas many of the behavioral and lifestyle features of this disorder (e.g., sensation seeking, criminal offending) are shared with other antisocial subtypes, psychopa...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notably, counterfactual thinking and regret engage strikingly similar neural circuitry (25,26). The strongest overlap is in mOFC, a region where structural and functional alterations are consistently found in psychopathy.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

Psychopathic individuals exhibit but do not avoid regret during counterfactual decision making

Baskin‐Sommers

Stuppy-Sullivan

Buckholtz

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Counterfactual thinking (CFT) is a specific type of conditional reasoning involving mental representations of alternatives to past situations that were once factual possibilities but which never occurred (Van Hoeck et al, 2015; Byrne, 2016). This process is mainly activated by negative outcomes in the form of “if only” conditional prepositions (Kahneman and Tversky, 1982; Roese, 1997; Byrne and McEleney, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symptomatic Remission and Counterfactual Reasoning in Schizophrenia

et al. 2017

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Counterfactual thinking (CFT) is a type of conditional reasoning involving mental representations of alternatives to past factual events that previous preliminary research has suggested to be impaired in schizophrenia. However, despite the potential impact of these deficits on the functional outcome of these patients, studies examining the role of CFT in this disorder are still few in number. The present study aimed to extent previous results by evaluating CFT in the largest sample to date of schizophrenia patients in symptomatic remission and healthy controls. The relationship with symptomatology, illness duration, and sociodemographic characteristics was also explored.Methods: Seventy-eight schizophrenia patients and 84 healthy controls completed a series of tests that examined the generation of counterfactual thoughts, the influence of the “causal order effect,” and the ability to counterfactually derive inferences by using de Counterfactual Inference Test.Results: Compared with controls, patients generated fewer counterfactual thoughts when faced with a simulated scenario. This deficit was negatively related to scores on all dimensions of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale-PANNS, as well as to longer illness duration. The results also showed that schizophrenia patients deviated significantly from the normative pattern when generating inferences from CFT.Conclusions: These findings reveal CFT impairment to be present in schizophrenia even when patients are in symptomatic remission. However, symptomatology and illness duration may have a negative influence on these patients' ability to generate counterfactual thoughts. The results might support the relevance of targeting CFT in future treatment approaches, although further research is needed to better describe the relationship between CFT and both symptomatology and functional outcome.

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“…This was in contrast to the finding that the perceived plausibility of episodic future projections increased with repeated simulation. Thus, although both episodic counterfactuals and episodic future projections are simulations of hypothetical events, temporal direction creates a difference for perceived plausibility of the simulated event.Furthermore, neural evidence is inconclusive, showing that mental simulation of alternatives to past events activates many regions in the default network, and both episodic counterfactuals and episodic future projections activate a common neural network despite differences in hippocampal activity (e.g., Schacter, et al, 2012Schacter, et al, , 2015Van Hoeck, et al, 2013;Van Hoeck, Watson, & Barbey, 2015).One limitation of these studies is that the episodic counterfactuals were constructed through a process that was more constrained by the experimenter than the construction of the other two event types. First, the participants generated an actual memory of a past event in response to a word cue (De Brigard & Giovanello, 2012) or an emotion cue (De Brigard et al, 2013).…”

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confidence: 97%

Imagining the personal past: Episodic counterfactuals compared to episodic memories and episodic future projections

2016

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Publication metadata Title:Imagining the personal past: Episodic counterfactuals compared to episodic memories and episodic future projections Author(s):Özbek, M., Bohn, A., & Berntsen, D. Journal:Memory and Cognition DOI/Link:10.3758/s13421-016-0671-2 Document version:Accepted manuscript (post-print)Notice: This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Memory & Cognition.A definitive version was subsequently published in Memory & Cognition, 45, 375-389. DOI: 10.3758/s13421-016-0671-2 Imagining the personal past: Episodic counterfactuals compared to episodic memories and episodic future projectionsMüge Özbek, Annette Bohn, Dorthe Berntsen Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus UniversityCorrespondence concerning this article should be addressed to Müge Özbek, Center on Autobiographical Memory Research (CON AMORE), Department of Psychology and BehaviouralSciences, School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 9, Aarhus C, 8000, Denmark. Telephone: +4587164428 E-mail: muge@psy.au.dkNotice: This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Memory & Cognition.A definitive version was subsequently published in Memory & Cognition, 45, 375-389. DOI: 10.3758/s13421-016-0671-2 2 AbstractEpisodic counterfactuals are imagined events that could have happened, but did not happen, in a person's past. Such imagined past events are important aspects of mental life, affecting emotions, decisions, and behaviors. However, studies examining their phenomenological characteristics and content are few. Here we introduced a new method to systematically compare self-generated episodic counterfactuals to self-generated episodic memories and future projections with regard to their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., imagery, emotional valence, rehearsal) and content (e.g., reference to cultural life script), and how these were affected by temporal distance(1 month, 1 year, 5+ years). The findings showed that the three types of events differed phenomenologically. First, episodic memories were remembered more easily, with more sensory details, and from a dominantly field perspective compared to both future projections and episodic counterfactuals. Second, episodic future projections were more positive, more voluntarily rehearsed, and more central to life story and identity than both episodic memories and episodic counterfactuals. Third, episodic counterfactuals differed from both episodic memories and future projections by neither having the positivity bias of the future events nor the enhanced sensory details of the past events. Across all three event types sensory details decreased, whereas importance, reference to cultural life script, and centrality increased with increasing temporal distance. The findings show that imagined events are phenomenologically different from memories of experienced events, consistent with reality monitoring theory, and that imagined future events are d...

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Cognitive neuroscience of human counterfactual reasoning

Cited by 84 publications

References 255 publications

Psychopathic individuals exhibit but do not avoid regret during counterfactual decision making

Psychopathic individuals exhibit but do not avoid regret during counterfactual decision making

Symptomatic Remission and Counterfactual Reasoning in Schizophrenia

Imagining the personal past: Episodic counterfactuals compared to episodic memories and episodic future projections

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