Poster D45, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Counterfactual reasoning fails when its premise is not true: Evidence from ERP
Xiaodong Xu1, Lijuan Chen1;1School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University
Counterfactual reasoning about what might have been is pervasive in everyday life (Byrne, 2002), it is closely related human’s cognition and emotions. One the one hand, counterfactual reasoning allows people to learn from the experience to avoid making the same mistakes. On the other hand, it can evoke strong emotional reactions, such as regret and relief, and thus help people regulate behavior and emotions in order to adopt to the physical and social environment (Kulakova & Nieuwland, 2016). Using Event-related Potentials, this study investigated how counterfactual reasoning is affected by the truth value of a premise context. The result showed that logically invalid sentence evoked a larger P600 compared to the logically valid sentence when the premise was true (e.g., New technology has made the quality of today’s buildings generally improved. If the San Francisco earthquake had occurred in this century, the number of casualties would be small/large, surely.), whereas the same size of the P600 was elicited at the critical word when the premise was false (New technology has made the quality of today’s buildings generally declined. If the San Francisco earthquake had occurred in this century, the number of casualties would be large/small, surely.), Moreover, for those logically valid sentences, the critical word evoked a larger P600 when the premise was false than when it was true. These results suggest that counterfactual reasoning depends on the truth value of the premise context, counterfactual reasoning fails when its premise is not true. Finally, there was a significantly positive correlation between the P600 effect difference (invalid vs. valid) and readers’ empathy’s score (by Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test: RMET) when the premise was true but not when it was false, suggesting that those readers with higher Theory of Mind/Perspective Taking abilities are more sensitive to counterfactual reasoning. In addition, a significant negative correlation between the P600 effect and readers’ working memory span suggests that readers with low working memory abilities have more difficulty in understanding and making counterfactual reasoning.
Themes: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Reading
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)