Canceling updating in the comprehension of counterfactuals embedded in narratives
@article{Vega2007CancelingUI,
title={Canceling updating in the comprehension of counterfactuals embedded in narratives},
author={Manuel de Vega and Mabel Urrutia and Bernardo Riffo},
journal={Memory \& Cognition},
year={2007},
volume={35},
pages={1410-1421}
}Participants were given counterfactual sentences—for example, “If Mary had won the lottery she would have bought a Mercedes car” —or factual sentences—for example, “Because Mary won the lottery, she bought a Mercedes car” —embedded in short narratives. Reading times showed that readers were immediately sensitive to the special status of counterfactual information (Experiment 1). In addition, probe-recognition latencies demonstrated that old information was more accessible in counterfactual than…
49 Citations
Eye movements reveal rapid concurrent access to factual and counterfactual interpretations of the world
- PsychologyQuarterly journal of experimental psychology
- 2012
Two eye movement studies that investigated the time-course with which comprehenders can set up and access factual inferences based on a realistic counterfactual context provide evidence that readers can rapidly make a factual inference from a preceding counterfactsual context, despite maintaining access to bothcounterfactual and factual interpretations of events.
Discourse updating after reading a counterfactual event
- Psychology
- 2012
This paper explores the temporal course of discourse updating after reading counterfactual events. To test the accessibility to discourse information, readers were asked to identify probes related to…
Examining the cognitive costs of counterfactual language comprehension: Evidence from ERPs
- PsychologyBrain Research
- 2015
Counterfactual sentences activate embodied meaning: An action–sentence compatibility effect study
- Psychology
- 2011
Recent evidence suggests that understanding factual action-related sentences involves embodied simulations. But, what happens with counterfactual sentences that describe hypothetical events in the…
Plausibility and Perspective Influence the Processing of Counterfactual Narratives
- Psychology
- 2018
ABSTRACT Previous research has established that readers’ eye movements are sensitive to the difficulty with which a word is processed. One important factor that influences processing is the fit of a…
“If a lion could speak …”: Online sensitivity to propositional truth-value of unrealistic counterfactual sentences
- Philosophy
- 2013
Literature Reading Modulates Pronoun Resolution in Counterfactual World: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials
- PsychologyJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition
- 2019
Different from causal and hypothetical conditionals, the dual meaning and pragmatic implications ofcounterfactuals may prompt people to go beyond here and now to elaborate their mental models and entertain alternative interpretations, and substantial literature exposure would further enhance pragmatic inference of counterfactual context.
Understanding Counterfactuality: A Review of Experimental Evidence for the Dual Meaning of Counterfactuals
- PsychologyLang. Linguistics Compass
- 2016
It is argued that these studies do not offer direct evidence for the online computation of counterfactual dual meaning, but they provide valuable information about the waycounterfactual meaning unfolds in time and influences successive information processing.
An investigation into the online processing of counterfactual and indicative conditionals
- Psychology, PhilosophyQuarterly journal of experimental psychology
- 2009
It is proposed that current theories of conditionals need to be able to account for online processing differences between indicative and counterfactual conditionals.
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 35 REFERENCES
Reasoning counterfactually: making inferences about things that didn't happen.
- Philosophy, PsychologyJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition
- 2002
Reasoners who made a counterfactual interpretation of subjunctive statements endorsed different inferences than those who did not and were more likely to judge the situation in which p and q occurred to be inconsistent with the conditional statement and make negative inferences such as modus tollens.
Counterfactual and semifactual conditionals prime alternative possibilities.
- PsychologyJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition
- 2005
The authors examined in 3 experiments the comprehension of counterfactuals and semifactuals, such as "Even if it had rained, the plants would have bloomed," compared with indicative conditionals, "If it rained), and found that people read the negative conjunction, "not p and not q" faster when it was primed by a counterfactUAL than when it is primed by an indicative conditional.
Backward updating of mental models during continuous reading of narratives.
- Psychology
- 1995
Participants' ability to track the protagonist's position and surroundings, during continuous reading, was investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read passages involving either inside-outside or…
Conditionals: A Theory of Meaning, Pragmatics, and Inference
- Philosophy
- 2002
You reason about conditional relations because much of your knowledge is conditional. If you get caught speeding, then you pay a fine. If you have an operation, then you need time to recuperate. If…
Effects of negation and situational presence on the accessibility of text information.
- PsychologyJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition
- 2003
In 2 experiments, participants read narratives containing a color term that was mentioned either within the scope of an explicit negative or not, and with the described situation being such that the…
Negation and its impact on the accessibility of text information
- PsychologyMemory & cognition
- 2001
In two experiments, participants were presented with narrative texts including negation sentences that either introduced or referred to entities, and that either described a situation in which only the nonnegated or only the negated entity was present.
Processing Narrative Time Shifts
- Psychology
- 1996
This study examined how the chronological distance between 2 consecutively narrated story events affects the on-line comprehension and mental representation of these events. College students read…
Updating situation models.
- PsychologyJournal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition
- 2004
The current authors constructed materials that circumvent identified confounds and in a reading-time experiment obtained evidence supporting the here-and-now hypothesis.
Mental models and counterfactual thoughts about what might have been
- Psychology, PhilosophyTrends in Cognitive Sciences
- 2002