Coherence Across Tasks In the Development of Counterfactual Reasoning

Counterfactual reasoning -- the ability to consider what could, would, or should have happened alongside what actually occurred -- is foundational to causal understanding, learning from experience, and making sense of others’ minds. While this skill emerges in early childhood, its developmental trajectory remains debated. How does this ability develop and what other constructs is it related to? To investigate, we explored the development of counterfactual reasoning through a 14-item unmoderated online battery measuring counterfactual reasoning across narrative, physical, and causal-machine domains in 320 children (ages 3-7). We found steady improvement on the tasks, with performance improving over early to middle childhood. Performance was also positively correlated within all three tasks, controlling for age and performance on non-counterfactual cognitive tasks, suggesting that all three domains were tapping into a similar underlying counterfactual ability. Additionally, children who responded correctly on narrative counterfactuals that could not be solved using heuristic shortcuts performed better across the other counterfactual tasks (Study 1) and Theory of Mind tasks (Study 2). These findings provide evidence for a latent construct underlying counterfactual reasoning and introduce a validated tool for future research.