Counterfactuals

The ability to update our knowledge using contextual information is a vital process during everyday language comprehension. Counterfactual language (e.g. If…then…) establishes a special kind of context which requires a person to represent false information as temporarily true (and vice versa). While a long tradition of research has explored counterfactual reasoning strategies, and the kinds of counterfactual thoughts people are likely to generate in a variety of circumstances, it is only very recently that researchers have begun to empirically test how counterfactuals are represented and accessed online during language comprehension. This emerging research has employed temporally-sensitive cognitive neuroscientific methodologies alongside language comprehension tasks to demonstrate that healthy adult readers can make appropriate inferences following a counterfactual context, showing rapid, and possibly simultaneous, access to both the counterfactual and factual interpretations of events. Future research is needed to explore the link between counterfactual thinking and social cognition, including how counterfactual thinking is affected when social skills are impaired (as in autism spectrum disorders).