The Research On The Development Of Young Children's Counterfactual Thinking And Its Relationship With Theory Of Mind

Counterfactual thinking, generally, refers to an understanding of events that are "counter to reality" or false and involves comparing reality to an imagined alternative. It is an important characteristic of human consciousness. Counterfactual thinking in adult cognition has been a topic of great interest to researchers for many years. Recently researchers began to focus on its development in young children. However, there was seldom research on China's young children. In the present thesis, first, a briefly introduction was made on the conception, classification, underlying process, and function of counterfactual thinking. Then a comprehensive review was conducted with regard to the important empirical findings, theoretical explanations, as well as the methodology (e.g. the development of young children's counterfactual thinking and its relations to theory of mind) in overseas young children's counterfactual thinking. A further analysis was executed focusing on the limitations of the previous research. On the basis of these, two related studies were presented to explore the development of 3-to 5-year-old children's counterfactual thinking and its relationship with their theory of mind competence.It is known that very young children always make realist errors. But previous research could not name the reason why they met with difficulties in counterfactual reasoning. So in study 1, a series of experiments were made from the sight of executive function (especially IC and working memory). Experiment 1 manifested whether the errors in counterfactual tasks could accurately be described as "realist" errors. Experiment 2 further studied whether the errors occurred due to a general difficulty inhibiting a response to current reality if young children had indeed made realist errors. Experiment 3 examined if higher availability of the counterfactual alternative could facilitate young children's performance in counterfactual tasks via easier inhibition of current reality. Experiment 4 tested the hypothesis that "limitations of working memory can explain young children's incapability of counterfactual reasoning".Developmental psychologists have focused on the development of young children's counterfactual thinking and its relations to theory of mind recently. But there had no definite conclusions at present. Study 2 adopted a new method called "storybook", along with the storytelling method, to comprehensively analyze the relationship between different counterfactual reasoning (both consequent counterfactual reasoning and antecedent counterfactual reasoning) and theory of mind.The findings through the above two studies are as follows:(1) Young children indeed made realist error in counterfactual reasoning. But they also chose the third location as their answers in 3-choice task.(2) Young children's difficulty in handling counterfactual situations was not primarily due to difficulty in avoiding a response to current reality, but seemed to consequence in their particular difficulty in counterfactual reasoning.(3) Increasing the availability of the counterfactual alternative could not facilitate young children's performance in counterfactual tasks.(4) There was positive correlation between two working memory tasks (tapping/labeling task and counting/labeling task) and counterfactual thinking. The correlation was still robust even if the age factor had been controlled. Further regression analysis revealed that young children's performance in working memory was the significant predictor of their counterfactual thinking.(5) Young children's performance in counterfactual thinking manifested the ideas of the mental model theory. Explicit construction of counterfactual alternatives to factual situations increased the demand on working memory. But it seemed far beyond what the very young children had. However, counterfactual reasoning would come into young children's mind along with the increasing of their working memory capacity.(6) There was significant age difference in young children's consequent counterfactual reasoning and antecede...