The development of counterfactual reasoning about doubly-determined events

McCormack, Teresa; Ho, Margaret S.; Gribben, Charlene; O’Connor, Eimear; Hoerl, Christoph

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2017.10.001

Cited by 41 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Some interesting studies have shown that children around five years old were able to interpret counterfactual conditionals in the discriminate condition. This was shown by McCormack, Ho, Gribben, O'Connor, and Hoerl [22] and by Nyhout and Ganea [23] (see also [24]). They used two very simple tasks with few objects and the conditionals were about physical causation: the effects on the objects of simple actions.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 63%

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

2020

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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.

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Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 63%

“…They used two very simple tasks with few objects and the conditionals were about physical causation: the effects on the objects of simple actions. The question was formulated using "counterfactual expressions" in [22] but including the "if. .…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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“…However, evidence suggests that children can reason counterfactually about overdetermined physical events—compared to events involving human agents in narratives—by the age of 4 (Nyhout & Ganea, ) or 6 years (McCormack, Ho, Gribben, O’Connor, & Hoerl, ). For example, preschoolers in one study were familiarized with a box that lit up when certain types of blocks were placed on it (Nyhout & Ganea, ).…”

Section: A Framework For the Development Of Counterfactual Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, adults judge physical events as more deterministic than psychological ones (Strickland, Silver, & Keil, ). Comparing across studies, the findings suggest that children are more successful at reasoning counterfactually about physical systems (McCormack et al, ; Nyhout & Ganea, ) than about structurally similar problems involving human agents (Nyhout, Henke, et al, ; Rafetseder et al, ) and biological causal systems (Nyhout, Sweatman, et al, ). This could be because children perceive physical events as more deterministic.…”

Section: A Framework For the Development Of Counterfactual Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Development of the Counterfactual Imagination

Nyhout

Ganea

2019

Child Dev Perspectives

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When reasoning counterfactually, we think of alternative possibilities to what we know to be true about the world by imagining what would have happened had a situation been different. Research has yielded mixed findings and substantial debate over when this ability develops, how it is best conceptualized, and what functions it serves. In this article, we propose a framework of counterfactual reasoning in development. We argue that counterfactual reasoning is best understood by looking both at the representations of reality children manipulate counterfactually, and the cognitive processes that make up and contribute to counterfactual reasoning. In so doing, we highlight the fact that many of the component skills are present in early childhood. This framework yields testable predictions about children's counterfactual reasoning across a range of situations. We also discuss recent work that examines the contribution of counterfactual reasoning to learning in childhood.

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“…Two recent studies have used doubly determined events, where a single outcome has more than one potential cause, to try to ensure that children had to consider the specific events in the past. In McCormack et al (2018), two birds travelled down two separate slides towards a pig. If they reached this pig, it would get knocked over, but sometimes their paths were blocked.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%