Eye movements reveal rapid concurrent access to factual and counterfactual interpretations of the world

Abstract

Imagining a counterfactual world using conditionals (e.g., If Joanne had remembered her umbrella . . .) is common in everyday language. However, such utterances are likely to involve fairly complex reasoning processes to represent both the explicit hypothetical conjecture and its implied factual meaning. Online research into these mechanisms has so far been limited. The present paper describes two eye movement studies that investigated the time-course with which comprehenders can set up and access factual inferences based on a realistic counterfactual context. Adult participants were eye-tracked while they read short narratives, in which a context sentence set up a counterfactual world (If . . . then . . .), and a subsequent critical sentence described an event that was either consistent or inconsistent with the implied factual world. A factual consistent condition (Because . . . then . . .) was included as a baseline of normal contextual integration. Results showed that within a counterfactual scenario, readers quickly inferred the implied factual meaning of the discourse. However, initial processing of the critical word led to clear, but distinct, anomaly detection responses for both contextually inconsistent and consistent conditions. These results provide evidence that readers can rapidly make a factual inference from a preceding counterfactual context, despite maintaining access to both counterfactual and factual interpretations of events.

Keywords:

• Counterfactuals
• Indicative conditionals
• Eye movements
• Discourse processing

Acknowledgments

This work was carried out with the support of a grant from the University of Kent's Faculty of Social Sciences. Thanks are due to Ruth Byrne and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on this work.

Notes

¹ This model predicts that readers can represent the false alternative to a counterfactual utterance when that information is true within the counterfactual remit.

² Note that in contrast to Ferguson and Sanford (2008), the critical sentence used here prompted readers to infer the factual interpretation of the counterfactual context.

³ Note that this critical word would not be semantically anomalous without the preceding context sentence, and thus we are examining inferences based on local contextual manipulations and not more global reality-violations (as in Ferguson & Sanford, 2008).