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

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 expe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2020-12, Vol.15 (12), p.e0242967-e0242967
Main Authors: Gómez-Sánchez, Jesica, Ruiz-Ballesteros, José Antonio, Moreno-Ríos, Sergio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adults
Biology and Life Sciences
Child
Children
Comparative analysis
Comprehension - physiology
Counterfactual thinking
Educational psychology
Elementary school students
Epistemology
Female
Human information processing
Humans
Knee
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
People and Places
Philosophers
Psychological aspects
Psychological research
Social Sciences
Thinking - physiology
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0242967