Dropping things: Probing counterfactual thinking without counterfactual language

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to think about how things could have gone differently. Such counterfactual thinking underlies causal, social, and moral judgments. However, our understanding of how counterfactual thinking develops has been limited in at least two ways. First, many tasks rely on counterfactual language which may be difficult for young children to understand. Second, in most tasks, children can succeed without using genuine counterfactual thinking. We present a novel task that probes genuine counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language. Data from both children (N = 480) and adults (N = 90) in the U.S. across three versions of the task suggest that genuine counterfactual thinking emerges around five years of age.