Counterfactual thinking and false belief: The role of executive function

Drayton, Stefane; Turley-Ames, Kandi Jo; Guajardo, Nicole R.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.09.007

Cited by 84 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…This might put a greater burden on their working memory, causing an overload, which results in falling back on BCR and consequently a wrong answer to the test question. Drayton and colleagues (2011) reported that 5-year-old children who performed better on counterfactual tasks had higher working memory scores. In their study, children received antecedent and consequent counterfactual tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A clear sign of children being able to do so is their passing the false belief test. Several studies showed that CFR abilities are related to explicit understanding of false belief (Ecker, 2011; German & Nichols, 2003; Grant, Riggs, & Boucher, 2004; Guajardo & Turley-Ames, 2004; Hofer, 2010; Müller, Miller, Michalczyk, & Karapinka, 2007; Perner, Sprung, & Steinkogler, 2004; Riggs et al, 1998) and that inhibitory control is a partially mediating factor (Drayton, Turley-Ames, & Guajardo, 2011). Inhibition has also been found to predict performance on counterfactual tasks (Beck, Riggs, & Gorniak, 2009), but not whether they experience counterfactual emotions such as regret (Burns et al, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Counterfactual reasoning: From childhood to adulthood

Rafetseder

Schwitalla

Perner

2013

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

111

158

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counterfactual reasoning: From childhood to adulthood

Rafetseder

Schwitalla

Perner

2013

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

111

158

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“…mental representations of alternatives to past events [36] that, in this case, involve both the self and the other. Thinking about hypothetical events has been linked to executive functioning, especially working memory and inhibitory control [37]. Apart from engaging additional cognitive competencies, this level is likely to also pose more demands on mentalizing skills as chimpanzees and children do not show context effects in a modified UG [11], [12], [38].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

There's Something about a Fair Split: Intentionality Moderates Context-Based Fairness Considerations in Social Decision-Making

2012

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Fairness considerations are a strong motivational force in social decision-making. Here, we investigated the role of intentionality in response to unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game by manipulating both proposers' degree of control over the selection of offers and the context pertaining to the outcomes of offers proposers can choose from. As a result, the design enabled us to disentangle intention- and context-based decision-making processes. Rejection rates were higher when an unfair offer was intentionally chosen over a fair alternative than when it was chosen by the computer, outside proposers' control. This finding provides direct evidence for intention-based decision-making. Also, rejection rates in general were sensitive to the context in which an offer was made, indicating the involvement of both intention- and context-based processes in social decision-making. Importantly, however, the current study highlights the role of intention-based fairness considerations in basic decision-making situations where outcomes are explicitly stated and thus easy to compare. Based on these results, we propose that fairness can be judged on different, but additive levels of (social-) cognitive processing that might have different developmental trajectories.

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“…Thus, we added three 'neutral' words to the final target sentence of each item (identical across conditions within an item). Secondly, previous research has begun to demonstrate the importance of working memory in counterfactual thinking, with studies showing that counterfactual judgements are impaired under high working memory load (Goldinger, Kleider, Azuma, & Beike, 2003), and that reduced working memory capacity correlates with poorer performance on tasks that require counterfactual thinking (Drayton, Turley-Ames, & Guajardo, 2011). However, we are aware of no study that has examined how working memory might influence the incremental processing of counterfactual utterances compared to factual utterances (that only activate representation of a single version of the world).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

Ferguson

Cane

2015

Brain Research

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Recent empirical research suggests that understanding a counterfactual event (e.g. 'If Josie had revised, she would have passed her exams') activates mental representations of both the factual and counterfactual versions of events. However, it remains unclear when readers switch between these models during comprehension, and whether representing multiple 'worlds' is cognitively effortful. This paper reports two ERP studies where participants read contexts that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, followed by a second sentence describing a consequence of this event.Critically, this sentence included a noun that was either consistent or inconsistent with the preceding context, and either included a modal verb to indicate reference to the counterfactualworld or not (thus referring to the factual-world). Experiment 2 used adapted versions of the materials used in Experiment 1 to examine the degree to which representing multiple versions of a counterfactual situation makes heavy demands on cognitive resources by measuring individuals' working memory capacity. Results showed that when reference to the counterfactual-world was maintained by the ongoing discourse, readers correctly interpreted events according to the counterfactual-world (i.e. showed larger N400 for inconsistent than consistent words). In contrast, when cues referred back to the factual-world, readers showed no difference between consistent and inconsistent critical words, suggesting that they simultaneously compared information against both possible worlds. These results support previous dualrepresentation accounts for counterfactuals, and provide new evidence that linguistic cues can guide the reader in selecting which world model to evaluate incoming information against.Crucially, we reveal evidence that maintaining and updating a hypothetical model over time relies upon the availability of cognitive resources.

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Counterfactual thinking and false belief: The role of executive function

Cited by 84 publications

References 46 publications

Counterfactual reasoning: From childhood to adulthood

Counterfactual reasoning: From childhood to adulthood

There's Something about a Fair Split: Intentionality Moderates Context-Based Fairness Considerations in Social Decision-Making

Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs

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