Abstract
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.
Highlights
You can imagine a mother talking about her son and saying to her young daughter: i
We carried out an analysis of variance (ANOVA) using as independent variable Conditional, with the number of correct responses as dependent variable
The results show that, in general, adults present a high ability to conclude correctly from counterfactual conditionals in the inferential question
Summary
You can imagine a mother talking about her son and saying to her young daughter: i. A conjecture: Carlos wore knee pads and his knees were not injured. She needs to keep in mind that there are two possibilities and that one of them is real and the other is just a “conjecture”. This ability to think about which is the real one and which is the conjectured one is called ‘epistemic status’ about the possibilities [2]. We study the development of children in tracking that epistemic status and how it contributes to the whole ability to reason counterfactually from subjunctive conditionals.
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