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We spend much of our time going beyond the here and now. We dwell on the past, long for the future, and ponder how things could have turned out differently. The capacity to simulate counterfactual possibilities is an important feat of human cognition. Counterfactual thinking shapes how we make causal judgments, explain events, and assign responsibility. To simulate counterfactuals, three core ingredients are required: (1) a generative mental model of the world, (2) the ability to intervene on that model to imagine alternatives, and (3) the capacity to predict the consequences of those interventions. Gerstenberg presents the counterfactual simulation model (CSM), which integrates these components to account for people's intuitive reasoning about both the physical and psychological world. In the physical domain, the CSM predicts people's causal judgments about a variety of physical scenes, including dynamic collision events, complex situations that involve multiple causes, omissions as causes, and causal responsibility for a system's stability. It also captures the cognitive processes that underlie these judgments as revealed by spontaneous eye-movements. In the psychological domain, the CSM explains how people determine which agents made a difference to an outcome, whether someone helped or hindered another, and how responsibility is distributed among agents in joint actions. Together, these findings suggest that much of human thought can be understood as cognitive operations over mental models, with counterfactual simulation playing a pivotal role in how we understand and navigate the world.

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