How children and adults keep track of real information when thinking counterfactually Gómez Sánchez, Jesica Ruiz Ballesteros, Jose Antonio Moreno Ríos, Sergio This research was funded by grants from the Spanish Government, Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI2015-63505-P; PGC2018095868-B-I00) to SM and the Education, Culture and Sport Ministry (FPU15/05899) to JG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We are very grateful to the schools for their assistance with data collection and to the directors, teachers and children for their cooperation. Finally, we wish to thank Ruth Byrne and Cristina Vargas for their helpful comments. Thinking about counterfactual conditionals such as “if she had not painted the sheet of paper, it would have been blank” requires us to consider what is conjectured (She did not paint and the sheet was blank) and what actually happened (She painted and the sheet was not blank). In two experiments with adults (Study 1) and schoolchildren from 7 to 13 years (Study 2), we tested three potential sources of difficulty with counterfactuals: inferring, distinguishing what is real vs conjectured (epistemic status) and comprehending linguistic conditional expressions (“if” vs “even if”). The results showed that neither adults nor schoolchildren had difficulty in the comprehension of counterfactual expressions such as “even if” with respect to “if then”. The ability to infer with both of these develops during school years, with adults showing great ability. However, the third source factor is critical: we found that the key to young children’s difficulty with counterfactual thinking was their inability to differentiate real and conjectured information, while adults showed little difficulty with this. 2021-01-27T12:40:04Z 2021-01-27T12:40:04Z 2020-12-04 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Go´mez-Sa´nchez J, Ruiz-Ballesteros JA, Moreno-Rı´os S (2020) How children and adults keep track of real information when thinking counterfactually. PLoS ONE 15(12): e0242967. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242967] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/66078 10.1371/journal.pone.0242967 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Public Library of Science