Highlights► Counterfactual reasoning (CFR) develops gradually between 6 and 12 years. ► This development is not solely due to better executive functioning. ► CFR means creating the nearest possible world of a specific event. ► Children who fail lack an understanding of what to import from the specific event. ► They rather apply conditionals that express general regularities.

We investigated at what point in development 3-to 6-year-old children begin to demonstrate counterfactual reasoning by controlling for fortuitously correct answers that result from basic conditional reasoning. Basic conditional reasoning occurs when one applies typical regularities (such as "If it doesn't rain the street is dry") to counterfactual questions (such as "If it had not rained, would the street be wet or dry?") without regard to actual events (for example, if street cleaners had just been washing the street). In counterfactual reasoning, however, the conditional reasoning must be constrained by actual events (according to the "nearest possible world"). In situations when counterfactual reasoning and basic conditional reasoning would yield the same answers, even the youngest children gave mostly correct answers. However, tasks in which the two reasoning strategies resulted in different answers proved unusually difficult even for the older children.People often reflect on how an event in the past might have turned out differently. Creating such alternatives to known facts is called counterfactual reasoning (Roese, 1997). Although it is common among adults, it is still not clear what is necessary for proper counterfactual reasoning. This is a serious shortcoming because counterfactual reasoning is relevant in many different areas such as cognitive psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, and philosophy.Developmental psychologists have addressed this issue by exploring whether children's counterfactual reasoning abilities are related to their understanding of causation (German, 1999;Harris, German, & Mills, 1996;Kavanaugh & Harris, 2000), their understanding of false belief (Grant, Riggs, & Boucher, 2004;Guajardo & Turley-Ames, 2004;Müller, Miller, Michalczyk, & Karapinka, 2007; Perner, Sprung, & Steinkogler, 2004;Riggs, Peterson, Robinson, & Mitchell, 1998), their feeling of regret and relief (Amsel et al., 2003; Amsel & Smalley, 2000;Guttentag & Ferrell, 2004), their understanding of counterfactual and actual worlds as alternative possibilities at a certain time in the past Byrne, 2005), or their executive functions such as inhibitory control (Beck, Riggs, & Gorniak, in press) and working memory (German & Nichols, 2003; Robinson & Beck, 2000).The majority of these developmental studies assessed the ability to reason counterfactually by telling a short story (for example, "Carol made the floor all dirty with her shoes") and then asking a subjunctive question about the past (or present): "If Carol had taken her shoes off, would the floor be dirty or clean?" (Harris et al., 1996). Children's main error was to answer with what was actually the case in the story, that is, that the floor was dirty (referred to as a "reality error"). The predilection for reality errors subsides between 3 and 5 years, * Corresponding author. Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, Hellbrunnerstraße 34, A-5020 Salzburg, Austria, Tel.: eva.rafetseder@sbg.ac.at. Europe PMC Funders...

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Counterfactual reasoning about how events could have turned out better is associated with the feeling of regret. However, developmental studies show a discrepancy between the onset of counterfactual reasoning (at 3 years) and the feeling of regret (at 6 years). In four experiments we explored possible reasons. Experiment 1 (3- to 6-year-old children) and Experiment 2 (adult control) show that even when regret is assessed more directly than in previous studies (e.g., Amsel & Smalley, 2000) only adults but not children regret their decision. Experiment 3 (3- to 14-year-old children) suggests that double-questioning--asking children how happy they are with what they got before and after they had seen what they could have got--creates false positive indications of regret in the youngest children and that--when controlling for false positives--regret is not evident before 9 years. However, children before this age make a difference between attractive (three candies) and less attractive (one candy) items (Experiment 4; 6- to 8-year-old children). Taken together, this suggests that before 9 years of age children base their judgements solely on what they got without taking into account what they could have got.

Counterfactual reasoning (CFR)—mentally representing what the world would be like now if things had been different in the past—is an important aspect of human cognition and the focus of research in areas such as philosophy, social psychology, and clinical psychology. More recently, it has also gained broad interest in cognitive developmental psychology, mainly focusing on the question of how this kind of reasoning can be characterized. Studies have been inconsistent in identifying when children can use CFR. In this article, we present theoretical positions that may account for this inconsistency and evaluate them in the light of research on counterfactual emotions.

In most developmental studies the only error children could make on counterfactual tasks was to answer with the current state of affairs. It was concluded that children who did not show this error are able to reason counterfactually. However, children might have avoided this error by using basic conditional reasoning (Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, 2010). Basic conditional reasoning takes an antecedent, which like in counterfactual reasoning can be counter to fact, and combines it with a conditional (or set of conditionals reflecting knowledge of how the world works) to draw a likely conclusion. A critical feature of counterfactual reasoning then is that these additional assumptions be modelled after the actual events to which the counterfactual is taken to be counterfactual. In contrast in basic conditional reasoning one enriches the given antecedent with any plausible assumptions. In our tasks basic conditional reasoning leads to different answers than counterfactual reasoning. For instance, a doctor, sitting in the park with the intention to read a paper, is called to an emergency at the swimming pool. The question, "if there had been no emergency, where would the doctor be?" should counterfactually be answered "in the park". But ignoring the doctor's intentions and just reasoning on plausible grounds one might answer: "in the hospital". Only by 6 years, did children give mostly correct answers.

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