Document Detail


Reasoning counterfactually: making inferences about things that didn't happen.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  12450339     Owner:  NLM     Status:  MEDLINE    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
The authors investigated the relationship between reasoners' understanding of subjunctive conditionals (e.g., if p had happened, then q would have happened) and the inferences they were prepared to endorse. Reasoners who made a counterfactual interpretation of subjunctive statements (i.e., they judged the statement to imply that p and q did not happen) endorsed different inferences than those who did not. Those who made a counterfactual interpretation were more likely to (a) judge the situation in which p and q occurred to be inconsistent with the conditional statement and (b) make negative inferences such as modus tollens (i.e., approximately q therefore approximately p). These findings occurred with familiar and unfamiliar content, affirmative and negative conditionals, and conditional and biconditional relations.
Authors:
Valerie A Thompson; Ruth M J Byrne
Related Documents :
8936689 - Pointing and social awareness: declaring and requesting in the second year.
15647059 - Twelve- and 18-month-olds copy actions in terms of goals.
18715569 - The effect of the model's presence and of negative evidence on infants' selective imita...
827959 - Speech perception in the human infant and rhesus monkey.
17973799 - Fourteen-month-olds know what others experience only in joint engagement.
14711489 - Infants' emerging ability to represent occluded object motion.
772509 - Prenatal diagnosis of gastrointestinal tract obstruction.
2336709 - The effects of early treatment of hereditary tyrosinemia type i in infancy by orthotopi...
22876899 - Pharmacokinetics of antifungal agents in neonates and young infants.
Publication Detail:
Type:  Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't    
Journal Detail:
Title:  Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition     Volume:  28     ISSN:  0278-7393     ISO Abbreviation:  J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn     Publication Date:  2002 Nov 
Date Detail:
Created Date:  2002-11-26     Completed Date:  2003-03-27     Revised Date:  2006-11-15    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  8207540     Medline TA:  J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn     Country:  United States    
Other Details:
Languages:  eng     Pagination:  1154-70     Citation Subset:  IM    
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. valerie.thompson@usask.ca
Export Citation:
APA/MLA Format     Download EndNote     Download BibTex
MeSH Terms
Descriptor/Qualifier:
Adolescent
Adult
Attention*
Concept Formation*
Female
Humans
Logic*
Male
Middle Aged
Problem Solving*
Psycholinguistics
Reading*
Semantics

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine


Previous Document:  Memory seeding: representations underlying quantitative estimations.
Next Document:  Recursive retrospective revaluation of causal judgments.