counterfactual conditional reasoning in inferring the mental states of other people

Mental states are desires, percepts, beliefs, knowledge, thoughts, intentions, feelings, etc. They play a causal role in behaviour; I don’t go to get some chicken because it’s in the fridge, but because I believe it’s in the fridge and desire it. I’ll still go to the fridge if the chicken’s not there. We automatically infer mental states from people’s behaviour. This is incredibly adaptive, permitting prediction of other people based on what one knows about their beliefs and desires. Any theory of how we acquire these mentalising capabilities would have to explain children’s normal and abnormal development. Riggs and Peterson argue that young children's failures on false-belief and other theory-of-mind tasks are due to their inability to reason counterfactually.

Young children fail to understand other people will act on false beliefs. In the Sally-Ann task, Sally puts an object in box X and then departs. Ann moves the object to box Y during Sally’s absence. When Sally returns, the question to the child is: Where will Sally search for the object-in X or in Y? Most 4-year olds say X. 3 year olds (and autists) say Y. It seems to be quite a profound problem, e.g. even if Sally says, “I think it’s in X”, they still respond she thinks it’s in Y. In general there’s a developmental transition around 3/4.

Riggs and Peterson argue that the false belief task requires counterfactual conditional reasoning [1]. The false belief task is a reasoning task; the Sally-Ann story requires deduction because it never mentions where Sally thinks the chocolate is (it’s not a recall task). Theory of mind tasks (e.g. the false belief task) correlate with tasks that require counterfactual conditionals, e.g. Sally who had put her chocolate into location A didn't see how Ann used some of the chocolate for baking a cake and then put the rest of the chocolate into location B. Children's ability to answer the false belief question, "Where will Sally look for her chocolate?" correlates highly with their ability to answer the counterfactual conditional, "If Ann hadn't baked a cake, where would the chocolate now be?" Autists too are poor at counterfactual reasoning.

Social flexibility in pretend play correlates with theory-of-mind task performance. Autists do not pretend play. In pretence one could argue that you need to understand alternatives to the here and now, and that might be a precursor to counterfactual reasoning about the here and now. From 1½ to 3 years, children's pretence becomes more sophisticated in terms of tracking the counterfactual consequences of pretence. E.g. when naughty Teddy is pretending to have tea in his cup and tilts the cup over a piece of chocolate children are able to state that the piece of chocolate is now wet. Mainstream children (not autists) do better at counterfactual reasoning, like “if everyone were blind…” if you replace the if with pretend, i.e. “pretend everyone could fly…”

The appearance-reality distinction task correlates with the false belief task, and a theory-theory metarepresentational account explains this quite well, while a counterfactual reasoning account can’t easily. Here’s an example of an appearance-reality distinction task: participants are presented with a sponge made to look like a rock. After discovering the object's true identity, participants are asked how the object currently appears to their eyes (rock) and how or what it really and truly is (sponge). The usual finding is that 3-year-olds give the same answer to both questions, reporting either the appearance twice or the reality twice, i.e. not distinguishing between perceptual appearance and reality. In contrast, children of age 4 and older can distinguish between appearance and reality. Having said this, 3-year-old children don't appreciate that different properties are gained through different sense modalities, e.g. that you need your eyes to learn what colour an object is, but your hands in order to learn how heavy it is. This understanding develops between 4 and 6 years. So asking them what-something-looks-like and what-it-is is a bit like asking them the same question twice. The counterfactual equivalent to the appearance reality task could be “if I didn't know it was a sponge, and I saw it then I'd think it was a rock”. So the equivalent question would be, "pretend it's not a sponge, what does it look like?" i.e. making the counterfactual explicit.

Even harder to explain using a counterfactual reasoning account is  why there is a correlation between false-belief task performance and children’s realising their reflexive knee movement is involuntary. The knee-jerk reflex task does not contain any obvious conditional reasoning requirements, but can be explained using theory-theory’s “theory of mind” ideas of a child’s developing understanding in the domain of knowledge about one’s own thinking and others. Preschoolers are poor at determining when a person (self or other) is thinking and also what the person is and is not thinking about, even when the evidence is quite clear. They understand that thinking is an animates’ in-the-head activity that can take as its objects non-present and non-real things. They seem largely unaware of their own on-going inner speech and may not even know that speech can be covert. They are unaware of the stream of thinking in people who are conscious, e.g. preschoolers do not consistently attribute any mental activity at all to a person who just sits quietly. They do not assume that something must be going on in a person's mind, even when that person is looking at or listening to something, reading, or talking to another person. Younger children are inclined to attribute self-awareness and decision-making abilities to an unconscious person, e.g. most 5-year-olds, and few 8-year-olds and adults, say that people know they are asleep while they are deeply asleep and not dreaming. When a sleeping person stirs in response to a light touch but does not wake up, older children and adults believe that the sleeper sort of felt it but did not consciously think that he or she had been touched; in contrast, preschoolers usually say that the person would experience the conscious thought as well as the low-level feeling. When preschoolers are asked to report their own mental activity they also have difficulties. A group of 5-9 year olds sat in the special “Don’t Think chair” and were told not to think for a while. After a while they were moved over to the normal chair and were asked: "While you were sitting over there in that Don’t Think chair, you tried not to have any thoughts. What happened? Did you have no thoughts at all or did you have some thoughts anyway?" Very few 5-year olds but most 8 year olds and adults admit to having had some thoughts.

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