Scientific reasoning and counterfactual reasoning in development

Why imagining what could have happened matters for children's social cognition

Counterfactual thinking is a relatively late emerging ability in childhood with key implications for emerging social cognition and behavior.

Children's hypothetical reasoning about complex and dynamic systems

Children's hypothetical reasoning about a complex and dynamic causal system was investigated. Predominantly White, middle-class 5- to 7-year-old children from the Greater Toronto Area learned about novel food chains and were asked to consider the effects of removing one species on the others. In Study 1 (N = 72; 36 females, 36 males; 2018), 7-year-olds answered questions about both direct and indirect effects with a high degree of accuracy, whereas 5-year-olds performed at chance. Six-year-olds showed intermediate performance. Using food chains with clearer constraints, Study 2 (N = 72; 35 females, 37 males; 2020-2021) replicated these findings. These results indicate that the ability to think about hypothetical changes to dynamic causal systems develops between 5 and 7 years. Implications for science education are discussed.

Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny

Humans possess the remarkable capacity to imagine possible worlds and to demarcate possibilities and impossibilities in reasoning. We can think about what might happen in the future and consider what the present would look like had the past turned out differently. We reason about cause and effect, weigh up alternative courses of action and regret our mistakes. In this theme issue, leading experts from across the life sciences provide ground-breaking insights into the proximate questions of how thinking about possibilities works and develops, and the ultimate questions of its adaptive functions and evolutionary history. Together, the contributions delineate neurophysiological, cognitive and social mechanisms involved in mentally simulating possible states of reality; and point to conceptual changes in the understanding of singular and multiple possibilities during human development. The contributions also demonstrate how thinking about possibilities can augment learning, decision-making and judgement, and highlight aspects of the capacity that appear to be shared with non-human animals and aspects that may be uniquely human. Throughout the issue, it becomes clear that many developmental milestones achieved during childhood, and many of the most significant evolutionary and cultural triumphs of the human species, can only be understood with reference to increasingly complex reasoning about possibilities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

Learning science concepts through prompts to consider alternative possible worlds

We investigated whether prompting children to think counterfactually when learning a complex science concept (planetary habitability) would promote their learning and transfer. In Study 1, children (N = 102 6- and 7-year-olds) were either prompted to think counterfactually about Earth (e.g., whether it is closer to or farther from the sun) or prompted to think about examples of different planets (Venus and Neptune) during an illustrated tutorial. A control group did not receive the tutorial. Children in the counterfactual and examples groups showed better comprehension and transfer of the concept than those in the control group. Moreover, children who were prompted to think counterfactually showed some evidence of better transfer to a novel planetary system than those who were prompted to think about different examples. In Study 2, we investigated the nature of the counterfactual benefit observed in Study 1. Children (N = 70 6- and 7-year-olds) received a tutorial featuring a novel (imaginary) planet and were either prompted to think counterfactually about the planet or prompted to think about examples of additional novel planets. Performance was equivalent across conditions and was better than performance in the control condition on all measures. The results suggest that prompts to think about alternative possibilities-both in the form of counterfactuals and in the form of alternative possible worlds-are a promising pedagogical tool for promoting abstract learning of complex science concepts.