How children and adults keep track of real information when thinking counterfactually

Abstract

Thinking about counterfactual conditionals such as “if she had not painted the sheet of paper, it would have been blank” requires us to consider what is conjectured (She did not paint and the sheet was blank) and what actually happened (She painted and the sheet was not blank). In two experiments with adults (Study 1) and schoolchildren from 7 to 13 years (Study 2), we tested three potential sources of difficulty with counterfactuals: inferring, distinguishing what is real vs conjectured (epistemic status) and comprehending linguistic conditional expressions (“if” vs “even if”). The results showed that neither adults nor schoolchildren had difficulty in the comprehension of counterfactual expressions such as “even if” with respect to “if then”. The ability to infer with both of these develops during school years, with adults showing great ability. However, the third source factor is critical: we found that the key to young children’s difficulty with counterfactual thinking was their inability to differentiate real and conjectured information, while adults showed little difficulty with this.

Alternatives or syntactic negation? Adults’ and children’s preferences for constructing counterfactual possibilities

“…Consistent with previous findings, it seems that people can lose track of the footnotes (e.g. Gómez-Sánchez et al, 2020;Ruiz-Ballesteros & Moreno-Ríos, 2017). Accuracy decreases because these mental footnotes are required to distinguish real and conjectured possibilities.…”

“…Rafetseder et al, 2013). There is no agreement on when counterfactual thinking is fully developed in children, with some research finding this ability in school children (Gómez-Sánchez et al, 2020;McCormack et al, 2018; and others suggesting that even pre-schoolers are able to reason counterfactually in the same way as adults do (Guajardo et al, 2009;Roldán-Tapia et al, 2017). However, there is no clear explanation about the differences found between studies that find evidence for counterfactual thinking in early childhood and those that report it in later childhood.…”

“…whether it includes hypothetical future, timeless conditionals or just alternatives to past events) (Beck & Riggs, 2014;Buchsbaum et al, 2012;Rafetseder et al, 2010;Weisberg & Gopnik, 2013) or a misunderstanding in what the task is measuring (Rafetseder et al, 2010(Rafetseder et al, , 2013. Another factor that has been found to cause children's difficulty in reasoning with counterfactuals could relate to the ability to codify correctly the epistemic status, that is keeping track of which possibility is real and which one is conjectured (Gómez-Sánchez et al, 2020). Due to the high working memory load, they could lose the mental footnotes about which situation is the real one and which the conjectured one.…”

“…The sample size was computed using G*power based on the responses of children from Gómez-Sánchez et al (2020) previous results. We used the same strategy as in Study 1 but looking at differences in the interaction Conditional (even if, if) with Age-group in the epistemic measure found in Gómez-Sánchez et al (2020). In this case the minimum sample size required (partial eta squared .02 to get a power of .90) was 108 participants.…”

“…This means recognising which one of them is the real possibility and which one the conjectured possibility. Keeping track of the epistemic status is a difficult aspect of thinking counterfactually, as demonstrated by studies with children (Gómez-Sánchez et al, 2020) as well as with adults (Ruiz-Ballesteros & Moreno-Ríos, 2017).…”