Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Episodic counterfactual thinking refers to the capacity to imagine different ways in which the personal past might have unfolded. However, when generating imagined alternative versions of personal past events, people face a potentially unlimited number of ways to alter them. Current research on modal cognition has posited that when generating imagined alternative versions of events, people tend to sample more plausible alternatives first. In the current study, we asked whether this sampling mechanism is engaged when people generate alternatives for their personal past. To address this question, we asked participants to recall an episodic autobiographical event and then sequentially generate four alternative versions of that event. Employing Bayesian mixed models, our results showed credible evidence that participants sampled more plausible and vivid alternatives first, while showing no credible evidence that simulation difficulty change across sequential generations.