School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham 815 2TT UK.
Br J Dev Psychol. 2010 Sep;28(Pt 3):505-21. doi: 10.1348/026151009x450836.
We investigated German and Nichols' finding that 3-year-olds could answer counterfactual conditional questions about short causal chains of events, but not long. In four experiments (N = 192), we compared 3- and 4-year-olds' performance on short and long causal chain questions, manipulating whether the child could draw on general knowledge to answer. We failed to replicate German and Nichols' result, finding instead that in two experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) there was no difference in performance on short and long causal chain questions and in two experiments (Experiments 2 and 4) children showed the opposite pattern: short causal chain questions were more difficult than long. These two unexpected patterns of results were replicated in a fifth study (N = 97). Children with lower language ability found short causal chains more difficult than long. Performance by children with higher language ability was unaffected by the length of the causal chain they had to consider. We found no evidence that children showed precocious counterfactual thinking when asked about recent events in a causal chain and conclude that counterfactual thinking develops after 4 years of age.
我们调查了德国和尼科尔斯的发现，即 3 岁的孩子能够回答关于短因果链事件的反事实条件问题，但不能回答长因果链事件。在四项实验中（N=192），我们比较了 3 岁和 4 岁儿童在短因果链和长因果链问题上的表现，操纵了儿童是否可以利用一般知识来回答问题。我们未能复制德国和尼科尔斯的结果，反而发现，在两项实验（实验 1 和实验 3）中，短因果链和长因果链问题的表现没有差异，而在另外两项实验（实验 2 和实验 4）中，儿童表现出相反的模式：短因果链问题比长因果链问题更难。这两种出人意料的结果模式在第五项研究（N=97）中得到了复制。语言能力较低的儿童发现短因果链比长因果链更难。语言能力较高的儿童的表现不受他们必须考虑的因果链长度的影响。我们没有发现任何证据表明，当被问及因果链中的近期事件时，儿童表现出早熟的反事实思维，因此得出结论，反事实思维在 4 岁后发展。
