Humans can imagine what happened in the past and what will happen in the future, but also
what did not happen and what might happen. We reflect on envisioned events from …

When reasoning counterfactually, we think of alternative possibilities to what we know to be
true about the world by imagining what would have happened had a situation been different …

Counterfactual reasoning is a hallmark of the human imagination. Recently, researchers
have argued that children do not display genuine counterfactual reasoning until they can …

We outline a dual systems approach to temporal cognition, which distinguishes between two
cognitive systems for dealing with how things unfold over time–a temporal updating system …

How do people make causal judgements? In this paper, I show that counterfactual
simulations are necessary for explaining causal judgements about events, and that …

When making moral judgments of past actions, adults often think counterfactually about what
could have been done differently. Considerable evidence suggests that counterfactual …

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 …

Pretend play universally emerges during early childhood and may support the development
of causal inference and counterfactual reasoning. However, the amount of time spent …

Young children often struggle to answer the question “what would have happened?”
particularly in cases where the adult-like “correct” answer has the same outcome as the …

Humans often engage in complex thought about the past, present, and future. They not only
think about what did happen, is happening, and will happen, but also what did not happen …