My current focus is on children’s speculation about alternatives to the here and now. One type of alternative, counterfactuals, are particularly interesting because they involve thinking about something that you know did not happen, for example, “I wish I’d worked harder at school.” Children find some types of questions about counterfactuals difficult until they are 4 years old. Ongoing projects examine whether domain general processes, such as executive functions might underpin children’s counterfactual thinking (in collaboration with Kevin Riggs), and how children relate the counterfactual to the real world. I am also interested in children’s thinking about future worlds, and the relationship between reasoning and emotion, for example in the experience of regret.
Another current project (in collaboration with Liz Robinson, Martin Rowley and Kerry McColgan based at Warwick University) we are exploring how children and adults represent different types of uncertainty. In a recent study we found that children seem more likely to acknowledge their uncertainty when an event has not yet happened (and so the uncertainty is physical) than when it has happened, but they are uninformed about it (epistemic uncertainty). We are currently running experiments with 4-8 year olds to see when they develop an adult-like understanding of possibilities.
