Berkeley Undergraduate Journal

This experiment investigates whether engaging in pretense may prompt preschool-aged children to reason counterfactually. Recent work suggests that ability to engage in pretense is associated with counterfactual reasoning abilities. While it is known that children are able to design accurate interventions on a causal system, are imagined interventions as informative as actual interventions in the real world? To this end, 4- and 5-year-old children were presented with a novel probabilistic causal apparatus. Children were either prompted to imagine actions performed on the structure, or were given a control task matched for attention and exploration of the apparatus.  Children were then asked to choose the intervention that would be the most effective in producing the desired outcome. Preliminary findings have demonstrated no difference in performance between conditions. However, the data indicated that children in the control condition might have spontaneously engaged in pretense when exploring the novel causal structure. To address this issue, changes have been made to the methods, and we are in the process of piloting the amended methods.