Abstract
Three experiments tracked participants’ eye-movements to examine the time course of comprehension of the dual meaning of counterfactuals, such as “if there had been oranges then there would have been pears.” Participants listened to conditionals while looking at images in the visual world paradigm, including an image of oranges and pears that corresponds to the counterfactual’s conjecture, and one of no oranges and no pears that corresponds to its presumed facts, to establish at what point in time they consider each one. The results revealed striking individual differences: some participants looked at the negative image and the affirmative one, and some only at the affirmative image. The first experiment showed that participants who looked at the negative image increased their fixation on it within half a second. The second experiment showed they do so even without explicit instructions, and the third showed they do so even for printed words.
Highlights
People often create counterfactual alternatives to reality in their everyday thoughts when they think “if only. . .” or “what if. . .” and imagine how a situation could have turned out differently (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1982; Byrne, 2005)
The analysis shows that when people understand the indicative conditional, they look at the affirmative image from very early (450 ms) and decrease their fixations on the negative image quite some time later (800 ms in Group 1; 1200 ms in Group 2)
The analysis shows that when people understand the indicative conditional, they look at the affirmative image or printed words from very early (350–450 ms) and decrease their fixations on the negative image quite some time later (1300 ms in Group 1; 900 ms in Group 2)
Summary
People often create counterfactual alternatives to reality in their everyday thoughts when they think “if only. . .” or “what if. . .” and imagine how a situation could have turned out differently (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky, 1982; Byrne, 2005). When people understand a counterfactual, such as “if there had been oranges there would have been pears,” they appear to envisage two possibilities, the imagined alternative to reality that corresponds to the counterfactual’s conjecture, “there were oranges and pears” and the known or presumed facts that correspond to actual reality, “there were no oranges and no pears” (for a review see Byrne, 2016). For a conditional in the indicative mood, such as “if there were oranges, there were pears,” they tend to envisage just a single possibility at the outset, “there were oranges and pears” (e.g., Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 2002; Khemlani et al, 2018). To fully understand the meaning of a counterfactual, people must simulate the imagined alternative to reality that is conjectured in a counterfactual, they must recover the presumed reality
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