Felipe De Brigard
Department of Philosophy
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Duke Institute for Brain Sciences
Duke University

Varieties of counterfactual thinking

Our capacity to imagine alternative ways in which reality could have been is known as counterfactual thinking. However, recent evidence suggest that this cognitive ability is not a unitary process. In this talk I explore a number of factors that differentially influence counterfactual thinking, and argue that these differences reflect recruitment of distinct cognitive and neural mechanisms. Specifically, I will provide evidence suggesting that different memory and attentional processes influence the particular variety of counterfactual thought we engage in.

A pizza lunch will be served at 11:45am. The seminar will begin at 12:00pm.