Processing counterfactual and hypothetical conditionals: An fMRI investigation
Open accessAbstract
Counterfactual thinking is ubiquitous in everyday life and an important aspect of cognition and emotion. Although counterfactual thought has been argued to differ from processing factual or hypothetical information, imaging data which elucidate these differences on a neural level are still scarce. We investigated the neural correlates of processing counterfactual sentences under visual and aural presentation. We compared conditionals in subjunctive mood which explicitly contradicted previously presented facts (i.e. counterfactuals) to conditionals framed in indicative mood which did not contradict factual world knowledge and thus conveyed a hypothetical supposition. Our results show activation in right occipital cortex (cuneus) and right basal ganglia (caudate nucleus) during counterfactual sentence processing. Importantly the occipital activation is not only present under visual presentation but also with purely auditory stimulus presentation, precluding a visual processing artifact. Thus our results can be interpreted as reflecting the fact that counterfactual conditionals pragmatically imply the relevance of keeping in mind both factual and supposed information whereas the hypothetical conditionals imply that real world information is irrelevant for processing the conditional and can be omitted. The need to sustain representations of factual and suppositional events during counterfactual sentence processing requires increased mental imagery and integration efforts. Our findings are compatible with predictions based on mental model theory.
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The property of contrastiveness presupposes that an explanation answers the why-question regarding the cause of the event in question in terms of hypothesized non-occurring alternatives.
“The property of contrastiveness presupposes that an explanation answers the given why-question regarding the cause of the event in question (''Why did P happen?'') in terms of hypothesized non-occurring alternatives (''Why did P happen rather than Q?'') [12].”
From A Survey of Contrastive and Counterfactual Explanation Generation Methods for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (2021) · cites this paper as [12]
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- Authors
- Kulakova, E., Aichhorn, M., Schurz, M., Kronbichler, M., & Perner, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Salzburg (AT)
- Corresponding author
- Kulakova, Eugenia
- Venue
- NeuroImage
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2013-05
- Volume
- 72
- Pages
- 265-271
- ISSN
- 1053-8119 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3610017
- OpenAlex
- W1983125601
- Cited by
- 66
- References
- 50
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 2
- FWCI
- 2.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- NeuroImage (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Doctoral College “Imaging the Mind” of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF-W1233)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
- Keywords
- counterfactual reasoning, counterfactuals, hypothetical conditionals, subjunctive mood, indicative mood, sentence processing, mental imagery, mental models theory, caudate nucleus, cuneus, auditory presentation, visual presentation, neural correlates
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Brain, Brain Mapping, Female, Humans, Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Thinking, Young Adult
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