Children's Thinking About Counterfactuals and Future Hypotheticals as Possibilities
2006/03/01 by Sarah R. Beck, Sarah R Beck, Elizabeth J Robinson +5 · 35 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Child and Animal Learning Development #Early Childhood Education and Development #Psychological and Educational Research Studies
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00879.x
Abstract
Two experiments explored whether children's correct answers to counterfactual and future hypothetical questions were based on an understanding of possibilities. Children played a game in which a toy mouse could run down either 1 of 2 slides. Children found it difficult to mark physically both possible outcomes, compared to reporting a single hypothetical future event, "What if next time he goes the other way ..." (Experiment 1: 3-4-year-olds and 4-5-year-olds), or a single counterfactual event, "What if he had gone the other way ...?" (Experiment 2: 3-4-year-olds and 5-6-year-olds). An open counterfactual question, "Could he have gone anywhere else?," which required thinking about the counterfactual as an alternative possibility, was also relatively difficult.
Cited by
- Children's Sensitivity to Their Own Relative Ignorance: Handling of Possibilities Under Epistemic and Physical Uncertainty
- Toddlers learn and flexibly apply multiple possibilities
- Do chimpanzees reason logically?
- Imagining what might be: Why children underestimate uncertainty
- Three- and four-year-old children represent mutually exclusive possible identities
- Understanding possibility through action: Young children’s modal reasoning in agentive contexts
- Thinking about thinking about time
- Imaginative Thought
- 小児高次脳機能障害の生活支援ニーズ・障害実態調査(第2報)
- Exploring the role of future hypothetical prompts in children’s planning abilities
- The functional theory of counterfactual thinking. [europepmc]
- Counterfactual reasoning: developing a sense of "nearest possible world". [europepmc]
- Is reasoning from counterfactual antecedents evidence for counterfactual reasoning? [europepmc]
- Children's competence or adults' incompetence: different developmental trajectories in different tasks. [europepmc]
- Blocking a redundant cue: what does it say about preschoolers' causal competence? [europepmc]
- Do children who experience regret make better decisions? A developmental study of the behavioral consequences of regret. [europepmc]
- Preparatory responses to socially determined, mutually exclusive possibilities in chimpanzees and children. [europepmc]
- Young children's capacity to imagine and prepare for certain and uncertain future outcomes. [europepmc]
- The Comprehension of Counterfactual Conditionals: Evidence From Eye-Tracking in the Visual World Paradigm. [europepmc]
- Of Blickets, Butterflies, and Baby Dinosaurs: Children's Diagnostic Reasoning Across Domains. [europepmc]
- The trajectory of counterfactual simulation in development. [europepmc]
- Opposites in Reasoning Processes: Do We Use Them More Than We Think, but Less Than We Could? [europepmc]
- Cognitive processes in imaginative moral shifts: How judgments of morally unacceptable actions change. [europepmc]
- What Could Go Wrong: Adults and Children Calibrate Predictions and Explanations of Others' Actions Based on Relative Reward and Danger. [europepmc]
- What do I want to feel? Emotion goals in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. [europepmc]
- What would have happened? Counterfactuals, hypotheticals and causal judgements. [europepmc]
- Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny. [europepmc]
- The pupillometry of the possible: an investigation of infants' representation of alternative possibilities. [europepmc]
- A plausible role of imagination in pretend play, counterfactual reasoning, and executive functions. [europepmc]
- Chimpanzees prepare for alternative possible outcomes. [europepmc]
- Calculated Feelings: How Children Use Probability to Infer Emotions. [europepmc]
- Can chimpanzees conceive of mutually exclusive future possibilities? A Comment on: 'Chimpanzees prepare for alternative possible outcomes' (2023), by Engelmann et al. [europepmc]
- Invited Reply: Modal reasoning in non-human animals: possible ways forward. [europepmc]
- The recursive grammar of mental time travel. [europepmc]
- Do Theory of Mind and Mental Time Travel abilities build on joint cognitive foundations? [europepmc]
Related