
Looking at Mental Images: Eye-Tracking Mental Simulation During Retrospective Causal Judgment.
How do people evaluate causal relationships? Do they just consider what actually happened, or do they also consider what could have counterfactually happened? Using eye tracking and Gaussian process modeling, we investigated how people mentally simulated past events to judge what caused the outcomes to occur. Participants played a virtual ball-shooting game and then-while looking at a blank screen-mentally simulated (a) what actually happened, (b) what counterfactually could have happened, or (c) what caused the outcome to happen. Our findings showed that participants moved their eyes in patterns consistent with the actual or counterfactual events that they mentally simulated. When simulating what caused the outcome to occur, participants moved their eyes consistent with simulations of counterfactual possibilities. These results favor counterfactual theories of causal reasoning, demonstrate how eye movements can reflect simulation during this reasoning and provide a novel approach for investigating retrospective causal reasoning and counterfactual thinking.
Duke Scholars
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Related Subject Headings
- Thinking
- Retrospective Studies
- Problem Solving
- Judgment
- Humans
- Eye-Tracking Technology
- Experimental Psychology
- 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
- 5202 Biological psychology
- 5201 Applied and developmental psychology
Citation

Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Thinking
- Retrospective Studies
- Problem Solving
- Judgment
- Humans
- Eye-Tracking Technology
- Experimental Psychology
- 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
- 5202 Biological psychology
- 5201 Applied and developmental psychology