Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Causal and temporal reasoning are fundamentally linked, butfew studies have directly examined how the ability to makecausal inferences about the past vs. the future develops. We useda counterfactual reasoning task to explore 4- to 6-year-oldchildren’s understanding of the causal relationships among past,present, and future events. Like adults, even 4-year-olds judgedthat future, but not past, events could be altered by interventionsin the present. This early sensitivity to the causal asymmetrybetween the past and future became more pronounced with age.We also found that children and adults selectively andappropriately use evidence about the present to make inferencesabout past events. Implications for theoretical accounts of thedevelopment of causal reasoning and abstract concepts of timeare discussed.