Improving users' mental model with attention‐directed counterfactual edits

Improving Physical Task Performance with Counterfactual and Prefactual Thinking

Counterfactual thinking (reflecting on "what might have been") has been shown to enhance future performance by translating information about past mistakes into plans for future action. Prefactual thinking (imagining "what might be if…") may serve a greater preparative function than counterfactual thinking as it is future-orientated and focuses on more controllable features, thus providing a pra...

Counterfactual Exploration for Improving Multiagent Learning

In any single agent system, exploration is a critical component of learning. It ensures that all possible actions receive some degree of attention, allowing an agent to converge to good policies. The same concept has been adopted by multiagent learning systems. However, there is a fundamentally different dynamic in multiagent learning: each agent operates in a non-stationary environment, as a d...

Running head: CAUSAL AND COUNTERFACTUAL EXPLANATION Mental Simulation and the Nexus of Causal and Counterfactual Explanation

Mental models and counterfactual thoughts about what might have been.

Counterfactual thoughts about what might have been ('if only em leader ') are pervasive in everyday life. They are related to causal thoughts, they help people learn from experience and they influence diverse cognitive activities, from creativity to probability judgements. They give rise to emotions and social ascriptions such as guilt, regret and blame. People show remarkable regularities in t...

Mental contrasting of counterfactual fantasies attenuates disappointment, regret, and resentment

“If only I had married that girl, my life would have been different. We would have been a good match for each other and we would have made a great couple...” Such mental representations of how our lives could have been better are termed counterfactual, representing an alternative scenario to the factual past (Kahneman and Miller 1986; Kahneman and Tversky 1982; Roese 1997). People who engage in...