Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reasoning about matters of tact and reasoning about matters of possibility and impossibility may depend on the same sorts of mental representations and processes. We illustrate a mental model theory of counterfactual thinking with reference to the action effect (the tendency to regret actions more than inactions) and we describe an experiment which examines the effects of short-term and long-term perspectives on regret for actions and inactions.