Imagination Research Group

Publications

Copies of our publications can be accessed through the Kent Academic Repository: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/view/people/35962.html

Nyhout, A., Veall, E., & Ganea, P.A. (in press). The Co-Construction of Counterfactual Worlds in Parent-Child Reminiscing. Developmental Psychology.

Genç, Z., & Nyhout, A. (2025). The Effect of Moral and Statistical Norm Violations in Children’s Counterfactual Reasoning. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5b2660gw

Friend, S., Nyhout, A., Smith, M., & Ferguson, H. (2024). Moral Understanding and Media: Meeting the Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research. Journal of Media Psychology, 36(4), 220–230. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000410

Genç, Z., & Nyhout, A. (2024). What If Pascale Had Gone to Another School: The Effect of Counterfactual Alternatives on 5-6-year-olds’ Moral and Happiness Judgments. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46(0). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hc8f6j0

Nyhout, A., & Mahy, C. E. V. (2023). Episodic thought in development: On the relation between memory and future thinking. Developmental Review, 70, 101103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2023.101103

Nyhout, A., Sweatman, H., & Ganea, P. A. (2023). Children’s hypothetical reasoning about complex and dynamic systems. Child Development, 94(5), 1340–1355. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13931

Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2022). Learning science concepts through prompts to consider alternative possible worlds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 222, 105466. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105466

Nyhout, A., & Lee, R. (2022). Young children are not driven to explore imaginary worlds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x2100234x

Veall, E., & Nyhout, A. (2022). Counterfactual Thinking: The Science of Wondering “What If?” Frontiers for Young Minds, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2022.769288

Huynh, E., Nyhout, A., Ganea, P., & Chevalier, F. (2021). Designing Narrative-Focused Role-Playing Games for Visualization Literacy in Young Children. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 27(2), 924–934. https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2020.3030464

Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2021). Scientific reasoning and counterfactual reasoning in development. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 223–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2021.04.005

Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2020). What is and what never should have been: Children’s causal and counterfactual judgments about the same events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 192, 104773. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104773

Walker, C. M., & Nyhout, A. (2020). Asking “Why?” and “What If?” Cambridge University Press EBooks, 252–280. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108553803.013

Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2019). Mature counterfactual reasoning in 4- and 5-year-olds. Cognition, 183, 57–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.10.027

Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2019). The Development of the Counterfactual Imagination. Child Development Perspectives, 13(4), 254–259. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12348

Nyhout, A., Iannuzziello, A., Walker, C. M., & Ganea, P. A. (2019). Thinking counterfactually supports children’s ability to conduct a controlled test of a hypothesis. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 41(0). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qr839xn

O’Neill, D. K., Deglint, T. J., McKinnon, A. M., Nyhout, A., & Scott, J. (2019). Busy toy designs reduce the specificity of mothers’ references to toy parts during toy play with their toddlers. Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, 43(1), 35–47. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/81936/

Strouse, G. A., Nyhout, A., & Ganea, P. A. (2018). The Role of Book Features in Young children’s Transfer of Information from Picture Books to real-world Contexts. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(50), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00050

Nyhout, A., Henke, L., & Ganea, P. A. (2017). Children’s Counterfactual Reasoning About Causally Overdetermined Events. Child Development, 90(2), 610–622. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12913

Nyhout, A., & O’Neill, D. K. (2017). Children’s Enactment of Characters’ Movements: A Novel Measure of Spatial Situation Model Representations and Indicator of Comprehension. Mind, Brain, and Education, 11(3), 112–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12142

Nyhout, A., Fecica, A. M., & O’Neill, D. K. (2015). Getting Lost in a Book: The Science of Reading Comprehension. Frontiers for Young Minds, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2015.00015

Nyhout, A., & O’Neill, D. K. (2014). Storybooks aren’t just for fun: narrative and non-narrative picture books foster equal amounts of generic language during mother-toddler book sharing. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00325

Nyhout, A., & O’Neill, D. K. (2013). Constructing spatial representations from narratives and non-narrative descriptions: Evidence from 7-year-olds – Kent Academic Repository. Kent.ac.uk. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/81941/1/Nyhout%20O%27Neill%202013%20Oasics.pdf

Nyhout, A., & O’Neill, D. K. (2013). Mothers’ complex talk when sharing books with their toddlers: Book genre matters. First Language, 33(2), 115–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723713479438

Our articles for kids

As well as publishing articles for fellow researchers, we publish articles for kids! Most of our articles are peer-reviewed by other researchers at universities, but we also have two articles that were written for and reviewed by kids featuring two of the main topics of our research! Both articles below are published in Frontiers for Young Minds, which publishes a great range of scientific articles with kids as the reviewers and the audience!