Impact Of Causal Chain Length And Situational Causality On The Counterfactual Reasoning Of3-5Years Old Children

Counterfactual thinking refers that people psychologically tend to deny the events happened in the past, and to construct in the thinking activity a hypothesis which might happen, but actually not.It is an important feature of human consciousness, and exerts a certain impact on people’s emotions, attitudes, expectations and causal judgment.In recent years, studies on children counterfactual reasoning have become popular in the field of developmental psychology. Although the research on the emotional aspects of counterfactual thinking about early childhood becomes developed, the study on the causal aspects on counterfactual reasoning is still in infancy. In particular, the research paradigms do not uniform, resulting in inconsistent conclusions of the study. Since the quantity of the research on early childhood counterfactual reasoning is less, and the quality of the related researches, which only validate previous studies and task difficulty and make interpretation of the causal chain, is not qualified, the potential impact of early childhood cognitive ability is not involved. Therefore, on the basis of previous studies, this study makes a certain improvements in order to develop the theory about the counterfactual reasoning of children in the context of Chinese culture. Moreover, the relationship between counterfactual reasoning ability and attribution, and between rejection control and working memory are discussed, in order to develop children counterfactual reasoning theory. In reference to dilemma tasks, inhibitory control tasks, operating procedures working memory tasks in the past studies, the procedure of experiment is slightly modified, taking into account the context causal factors that might affect children counterfactual reasoning, setting up three variables:the causal chain length, the situational causality, and the form of problems in causal chain counterfactual reasoning tasks. Based on the inspection on children attribution, inhibition and working memory performance-based controls, the trial will be assigned to the different experimental treatment for completing causal chain counterfactual reasoning tasks, in order to examine the characteristics of early childhood development counterfactual reasoning and factorsIn the paper, the conclusions is following:(1)3to5year-old children can apply counterfactual reasoning, and at different ages children,in the counterfactual reasoning, tasks behave differently:5-year-old children performed significantly better than the3-year-old and4year old children,4-year-old children performed significantly better than the3-year-old children.(2) The existence of causality between age and situational interaction:3-year-old children perform better in the context of the weak causal connection of counterfactual reasoning, while children aged4and5years old did better in the context of the strong causal connection of counterfactual reasoning.(3)There was an interaction between situational causality and causal chain length, and no difference on the answer to the short causal chain issues between different causal connection strength scenarios; on the answer to the middle causal chain and long causal chain issues, the results in the contest of the strong causal connection scenarios were significantly better in that of weak causal connection. The longer the chain of causation, the more obvious the difference is.(4)Age and the forms of problems. In the choice and explanation of problems, there is a significant difference:performance of choosing is significantly better than that of interpretation, and this difference in the group of3-year-old children is particularly prominent.(5)There is an interaction between the situational causality and control. In particular, in the strong causal connection situational story, children with low-level development of inhibitory control behave significantly better than in the weak causal connection situational story. For the group of children with middle-level development of inhibitory control, there is a few difference of results between different causal connection situational story.(6)There is a type of interaction between situational causality and working memory. Children who cannot complete working memory task behave indifferently in both causal connection strength of the story, those who can perform better in the context of the story causal connection strong anti-reasoning scores than in the weak causal connection situational story.