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Children's Counterfactual Reasoning About Causally Overdetermined Events
Author(s) -
Nyhout Angela,
Henke Lena,
Ganea Patricia A.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.12913
Subject(s) - overdetermined system , counterfactual thinking , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , psychology , causal reasoning , developmental psychology , causal structure , grice , causal model , cognition , social psychology , cognitive psychology , mathematics , statistics , linguistics , mathematical analysis , physics , philosophy , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , pragmatics
In two experiments, one hundred and sixty‐two 6‐ to 8‐year‐olds were asked to reason counterfactually about events with different causal structures. All events involved overdetermined outcomes in which two different causal events led to the same outcome. In Experiment 1, children heard stories with either an ambiguous causal relation between events or causally unrelated events. Children in the causally unrelated version performed better than chance and better than those in the ambiguous condition. In Experiment 2, children heard stories in which antecedent events were causally connected or causally disconnected. Eight‐year‐olds performed above chance in both conditions, whereas 6‐year‐olds performed above chance only in the connected condition. This work provides the first evidence that children can reason counterfactually in causally overdetermined contexts by age 8.