8
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      The Comprehension of Counterfactual Conditionals: Evidence From Eye-Tracking in the Visual World Paradigm

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          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.

          Related collections

          Most cited references48

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Counterfactual Thought.

          People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think "if only" or "what if" and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind computes counterfactuals for many reasons. Counterfactuals explain the past and prepare for the future, they implicate various relations including causal ones, and they affect intentions and decisions. They modulate emotions such as regret and relief, and they support moral judgments such as blame. The loss of the ability to imagine alternatives as a result of injuries to the prefrontal cortex is devastating. The basic cognitive processes that compute counterfactuals mutate aspects of the mental representation of reality to create an imagined alternative, and they compare alternative representations. The ability to create counterfactuals develops throughout childhood and contributes to reasoning about other people's beliefs, including their false beliefs. Knowledge affects the plausibility of a counterfactual through the semantic and pragmatic modulation of the mental representation of alternative possibilities.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Conditionals: A theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference.

            The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Representing Error bars in within-subject designs in typical software packages

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                14 June 2019
                2019
                : 10
                : 1172
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Department of Basic Psychology I, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) , Madrid, Spain
                [2] 2Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology (UNED) , Madrid, Spain
                [3] 3Department of Psychology, Universidad de La Laguna , Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
                [4] 4School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin , Dublin, Ireland
                Author notes

                Edited by: Katharina Spalek, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

                Reviewed by: Brian Leahy, Harvard University, United States; Bob Van Tiel, Free University of Brussels, Belgium

                *Correspondence: Isabel Orenes, iorenes@ 123456psi.uned.es

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01172
                6587111
                bc595291-147b-4be1-a8e0-0bd0a80033a8
                Copyright © 2019 Orenes, García-Madruga, Gómez-Veiga, Espino and Byrne.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 18 November 2018
                : 03 May 2019
                Page count
                Figures: 9, Tables: 1, Equations: 0, References: 74, Pages: 19, Words: 0
                Funding
                Funded by: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia 10.13039/501100005367
                Award ID: EDU2014-56423-R
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                counterfactuals,conditionals,comprehension,visual-world-paradigm,reasoning

                Comments

                Comment on this article