Poster #17 - The relation between the development of counterfactual thinking and Piagetian conservation

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

Conservation experiments are at the heart of Piaget’s theory that young children are easily misled by appearances and, therefore, fail to grasp that quantities are unaffected by irrelevant transformations (Piaget, 1952, Piaget & Inhelder, 1974). A seemingly unrelated research program on the development of counterfactual thinking has revealed that young children struggle to be conservative in counterfactual thinking (Rafetseder et al., 2013).

In this study, we explore the possibility that the ability for conservation and counterfactual thinking have a common cognitive denominator, which is the ability to reverse an action in one’s mind and accurately represent the counterfactual state. We thus investigate whether children’s understanding of conservation correlates with their capacity for counterfactual thinking.

In the first of two experiments, N = 48 (24 female) children from 5 to 7 years (60 - 84 months) complete conservation tasks followed by counterfactual thinking tasks in a single Zoom session. In conservation tasks, children receive four conservation problems (liquid, matter, number, and length; see Piaget & Inhelder, 1974). For example, the experimenter shows two rows of an equal number of evenly-spaced quarters, and the child is asked if the number of quarters in the rows is the same or different (pre-transformation question). Next, the experimenter spaces out the quarters of one of the rows. The child is then asked the same question again (post-transformation question). Subsequently, children receive counterfactual thinking tasks that were adapted from Rafetseder et al. (2013). Vignettes are presented in which two events (Bob and Lily painting on canvas) change the state of reality (the canvas changes from blank to painted). First, children receive control questions in which they are asked to report the original and current state of reality. Children are then asked counterfactual questions, e.g., “What if Bob had not painted on the canvas? Would the canvas be painted or blank?”

Preliminary analyses indicate no association between children’s success on conservation tasks and their counterfactual thinking abilities, r = -.02, p = .96. However, a floor performance on the conservation tasks was observed, presumably because the children were younger than age 7. By contrast, almost all children achieved high scores on the counterfactual thinking task, probably because our task modifications simplified the original tasks (see Nyout et al., 2019). In a second experiment with N = 48 (24 female) children (data collection ongoing), we raised the age to 6 to 8 years and used an alternative measure for counterfactual thinking, which requires children to understand that an object would still be in its original location under the counterfactual condition that an agent had not retrieved it (Rafetseder et al., 2013). This project will shed light on the question of whether there is a developmental link between solving conservation problems and counterfactual thinking. If so, then this would suggest that the mental “undoing” of transformations in conservation tasks affords counterfactual thinking.

Authors

• Bella Fascendini, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Qianhui Ni, University of Southern California

• Henrike Moll, University of Southern California