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23Counterfactual ThinkingIn Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Sarah R. Beck (eds.), Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 110. 2011.
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23The development of children's regret and reliefCognition and Emotion 26 (5): 820-835. 2012.We often think about the alternatives to a decision that has been made. Thinking in this way is known as counterfactual thinking, that is, thinking about what could have been had an alternative dec...
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51Thinking developmentally about counterfactual possibilitiesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5-6): 463-463. 2007.Byrne implies that working memory development underpins children's ability to represent counterfactuals as possibilities at 3 to 4 years of age. Recent findings suggest that (1) developments in the ability to consider alternatives to reality in children of this age are underpinned by improvements in inhibitory control, not working memory, and (2) children do not develop an understanding of counterfactuals as possibilities until mid-childhood
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51Relating developments in children's counterfactual thinking and executive functionsThinking and Reasoning 15 (4): 337-354. 2009.The performance of 93 children aged 3 and 4 years on a battery of different counterfactual tasks was assessed. Three measures: short causal chains, location change counterfactual conditionals, and false syllogisms—but not a fourth, long causal chains—were correlated, even after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary. Children's performance on our counterfactual thinking measure was predicted by receptive vocabulary ability and inhibitory control. The role that domain general executive func…Read more
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30Knowing when to hold ‘em: regret and the relation between missed opportunities and risk taking in children, adolescents and adultsCognition and Emotion 32 (3): 608-615. 2017.ABSTRACTRegret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential…Read more
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9The development of the imagination and imaginary worldsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.Evidence from developmental psychology on children's imagination is currently too limited to support Dubourg and Baumard's proposal and, in several respects, it is inconsistent with their proposal. Although children have impressive imaginative powers, we highlight the complexity of the developmental trajectory as well as the close connections between children's imagination and reality.
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30Tool innovation may be a critical limiting step for the establishment of a rich tool-using culture: A perspective from child developmentBehavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (4): 220-221. 2012.Recent data show that human children (up to 8 years old) perform poorly when required to innovate tools. Our tool-rich culture may be more reliant on social learning and more limited by domain-general constraints such as ill-structured problem solving than otherwise thought
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39Conditional Reasoning and Emotional Experience: A Review of the Development of Counterfactual Thinking (review)Studia Logica 102 (4): 673-689. 2014.What do human beings use conditional reasoning for? A psychological consequence of counterfactual conditional reasoning is emotional experience, in particular, regret and relief. Adults’ thoughts about what might have been influence their evaluations of reality. We discuss recent psychological experiments that chart the relationship between children’s ability to engage in conditional reasoning and their experience of counterfactual emotions. Relative to conditional reasoning, counterfactual emot…Read more
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69The Bidirectional Relation Between Counterfactual Thinking and Closeness, Controllability, and ExceptionalityFrontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.In four experiments, we explored the inferences people make when they learn that counterfactual thinking has occurred. Experiment 1 showed that knowing that a protagonist had engaged in counterfactual thinking resulted in participants inferring that the past event was closer in time to the protagonist, but there was no difference in inferring how close the past event was between knowing that a protagonist made many or a single counterfactual statement. Experiment 2 confirmed that participants we…Read more
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23From Brexit to Biden: What responses to national outcomes tell us about the nature of reliefSocial Psychological and Personality Science 13 (7): 1095-1184. 2022.Recent claims contrast relief experienced because a period of unpleasant uncertainty has ended and an outcome has materialized (temporal relief)—regardless of whether it is one’s preferred outcome—with relief experienced because a particular outcome has occurred, when the alternative was unpalatable (counterfactual relief). Two studies (N = 993), one run the day after the United Kingdom left the European Union and one the day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, confirmed these claims. “Leavers” and …Read more
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832Introduction: Understanding counterfactuals and causationIn Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack & Sarah R. Beck (eds.), Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-15. 2011.How are causal judgements such as 'The ice on the road caused the traffic accident' connected with counterfactual judgements such as 'If there had not been any ice on the road, the traffic accident would not have happened'? This volume throws new light on this question by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches to causation and counterfactuals. Traditionally, philosophers have primarily been interested in connections between causal and counterfactual claims on the…Read more
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22Is tool-making knowledge robust over time and across problems?Frontiers in Psychology 5 108248. 2014.In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration 3 months earlier. Performance was…Read more
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68Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.How are causal judgements such as 'The ice on the road caused the traffic accident' connected with counterfactual judgements such as 'If there had not been any ice on the road, the traffic accident would not have happened'? This volume throws new light on this question by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches to causation and counterfactuals. Traditionally, philosophers have primarily been interested in connections between causal and counterfactual claims on the…Read more
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40Why What Is Counterfactual Really Matters: A Response to Weisberg and Gopnik ()Cognitive Science 40 (1): 253-256. 2016.
Birmingham, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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