Developing thoughts about what might have been

Recent research has changed how developmental psychologists understand counterfactual thinking or thoughts of what might have been. Evidence suggests that counterfactual thinking develops over an extended period into at least middle childhood, depends on domain-general processes including executive function and language, and dissociates from counterfactual emotions such as regret. In this article, we review the developmental evidence that forms a critical but often-overlooked complement to the cognitive, social, and neuroscience literatures. We also highlight topics for further research, including spontaneous counterfactual thinking and counterfactual thinking in clinical settings. © 2014 The Society for Research in Child Development

The puzzling difficulty of tool innovation: Why can’t children piece their knowledge together?

AbstractTool innovation—designing and making novel tools to solve tasks—is extremely difficult for young children. To discover why this might be, we highlighted different aspects of tool making to children aged 4 to 6years (N=110). Older children successfully innovated the means to make a hook after seeing the pre-made target tool only if they had a chance to manipulate the materials during a warm-up. Older children who had not manipulated the materials and all younger children performed at floor. We conclude that children’s difficulty is likely to be due to the ill-structured nature of tool innovation problems, in which components of a solution must be retrieved and coordinated. Older children struggled to bring to mind components of the solution but could coordinate them, whereas younger children could not coordinate components even when explicitly provided

A comparison of laboratory, clinical and self-report measures of prospective memory in healthy adults and individuals with brain injury

Individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) have demonstrated deficits in prospective memory (PM) functioning when compared to healthy adults. These deficits have been measured using laboratory measures, clinical measures and self-report questionnaires. However, PM has been shown to involve multiple cognitive processes and have a variety of stages. Thus, it is not known if these measures all assess the same aspects of PM. Thus, this study was designed to measure the convergent validity of the three types of PM measures in both healthy adults and individuals with TBI. We aimed to investigate the convergent validity of the three types of tasks in two ways. First, we sought to investigate if the PM deficits experienced by people with TBI are consistent across tasks. And, second, we sought to examine the relationship between the three types of tasks. Results demonstrated that while all three types of measures were sensitive to PM deficits in TBI, there were differences in the aspects/processes of PM being measured. Data from the laboratory measure suggested a specific difficulty with detecting the correct cue. Data from the clinical measure suggested that TBI has a greater effect on time-based cues than event-based cues and that the primary deficit is a prospective intention retrieval deficit rather than the retrospective memory component. In addition, those with TBI did not differ from healthy adults when the time delay was short enough, suggesting that PM is not universally impaired. Data from the self-report questionnaire suggested that those with TBI are more sensitive to difficulties with basic activities of daily living rather than instrumental activities on daily living. These results are discussed in terms of rehabilitation techniques that could focus first on cue detection and use basic activities of daily living as outcome measures