Schedule of Events | Symposia

Age-Related Differences in Semantic Counterfactual Thinking

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Martin Ma¹, Shenyang Huang¹, Felipe De Brigard¹; ¹Duke University

People frequently engage in counterfactual thinking (CFT)—mentally simulating alternatives to reality. CFT plays a crucial role in everyday reasoning and decision-making, as well as high-stake situations such as in tort law. While previous research has mainly focused on the psychological underpinnings of episodic CFT—thoughts about alternative ways past personally experienced events could have occurred, less is known about the psychological mechanisms behind semantic CFT (sCFT)—imagining alternatives to objective knowledge of the world. This study examines age-related differences in the perceived plausibility of semantic counterfactual scenarios. Over four hundred younger adults (YAs, aged 18–30) and older adults (OAs, aged 60–85) evaluated factual and counterfactual statements across eight knowledge domains. Participants rated their knowledge and confidence about the facts, and rated how plausible the counterfactual scenarios are, how similar the counterfactual scenarios are to reality, and how detailed their imaginations are. OAs reported having higher confidence and more knowledge than YAs in most knowledge domains, as we expected. Importantly, we found that plausibility was strongly correlated with perceived similarity, replicating two past studies. More interestingly, this relationship was more pronounced in OAs. Additionally, we found that both the detailedness of the imagination and the semantic similarity between the factual and counterfactual statements predicted the perceived plausibility. Taken together, these findings validated the intimate relationship between perceived plausibility and similarity, and point toward an age-related cognitive difference in assessing counterfactual scenarios owing to OAs’ increased semantic knowledge, extending our understanding of how semantic memory and imagination evolve with age.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Semantic