Counterfactual thinking – the ability to consider alternatives to past events and make inferences about what might have happened – plays an important role in human learning and decision-making. In this line of work, we study the emergence of counterfactual reasoning in early childhood and how it contributes to learning.
In this research we investigate: 1) the development of counterfactual reasoning and its applications to learning; 2) the relation between children’s causal reasoning and their ability to reason counterfactually; 3) the types of spontaneous counterfactuals that children generate; 4) the role of counterfactual thinking in promoting children’s scientific reasoning skills.
Relevant Publications
- Nyhout, A., Veall, E. & Ganea, P. A. (2025). The co-construction of counterfactual worlds in parent-child reminiscing. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0002064
- Lu, J., & Ganea, P. A. (2025). What Almost Happened? Using Close-Counterfactuals to Prime a Simulation Mindset in Children. In D. Barner, N.R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri and C.M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science
Society. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10m5b57v - Grosu, I., Le, D., & Ganea, P. A. (2025). Backwards counterfactuals and the closest possible world. In D. Barner, N.R. Bramley, A. Ruggeri and C.M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Society. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0q93p7sc
- Nyhout, A., Sweatman, H., & Ganea, P. A. (2023). Children’s hypothetical reasoning about complex and dynamic systems. Child Development. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13931
- Nyhout, A. & Ganea, P. A. (2020). What is and what never should have been: Children’s causal and counterfactual judgments about the same events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104773 0022-0965
- Nyhout, A. & Ganea, P. A. (2019). The development of the counterfactual imagination. Child Development Perspectives. doi: 10.1111/cdep.12348
- Nyhout, A., Henke, L., & Ganea, P. A. (2019). Children’s counterfactual reasoning about causally overdetermined events. Child Development, 90, 610-622. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12913
- Nyhout, A., Iannuzziello, A., Walker, C.M., & Ganea, P.A. (2019). Thinking counterfactually supports children’s ability to conduct a controlled test of a hypothesis. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Montreal, CA: Cognitive Science Society. [poster]
- Nyhout, A. & Ganea, P. A. (2019). Mature counterfactual reasoning in 4- and 5-year olds. Cognition, 183, 57-66. doi: 10.1016/jcognition.2018.10.027