Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK
Topic: Counterfactuals
A Computational Model of Counterfactual Thinking: The Temporal Order Effect
By Clare R. Walsh & Ruth M.J. Byrne
People generate counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think about how things might have happened differently, if only. There are considerable regularities in the sorts of past events that people mentally undo, for example, they tend to mentally undo the most recent event in an independent sequence. Consider a game in which two contestants will win #1000 if they both pick cards from the same color suite. The first player picks black and the second red and they lose. Most people spontaneously undo the outcome by thinking, if only the second player had picked black. We describe a computational model that simulates our theory of the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying this temporal order effect. The computer model is corroborated by tests of the novel predictions of our theory: it should be possible to reverse the temporal order effect by manipulating the way in which the winning conditions are described.
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 10:05 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 4 December 2005 01:06 GMT
