Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper explores the dual meaning of counterfactual conditionals, such as ‘if there had been gloves, then therewould have been scarves’, by tracking the temporal course to envisage the possibility corresponding to the conjecture ‘therewere gloves and there were scarves’ and the presupposed facts, ‘there were no gloves and there were no scarves’. To testthis, we used the visual world paradigm, in which counterfactual and indicative conditionals were heard while four imagescorresponding to the conjecture, such as an image of gloves and scarves, and the presupposed facts, such as an image of nogloves and no scarves, and two distractors were shown on the screen and eye movements were monitored. We found thatpeople looked at the affirmative image in the indicative conditional, and both types of images (affirmative and negative) in thecounterfactual conditional. Results support the dual meaning of counterfactuals.