Johnson-Laird on his close friend, Danny Kahneman (1934-2024)
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted October 8, 2024
Phil Johnson-Laird wrote an elegiac essay for Thinking & Reasoning on his close friend and fellow Princeton colleague, Danny Kahneman, who passed away in March of this year. Phil described many of the discoveries that Kahneman made in...
Read MoreMental models explain how people reason about possibilities: Johnson-Laird & Ragni
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 12, 2024
Phil Johnson-Laird and Marco Ragni present a new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review on how people reason about possibilities. The present a theory that argues that a possibility, such as “it’s possible that she hid”, presupposes the possibility...
Read MoreAmbiguity detection and mental models of discourse
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 22, 2024
A new study by Calvin Laursen, Timothy Slattery, Martin Vassilev, and Jan Wiener, all from Bournemouth University, examines how people detect ambiguities in naturalistic texts. They show that participants often fail to detect ambiguities in descriptions when...
Read MoreWelcome, Selina Koralus!
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in Events
- posted May 20, 2024
Philipp and Jenny Koralus recently welcomed their baby daughter Selina! Congratulations to them both, and many warm wishes to the new parents from all your friends!
Read MoreIllusory inferences and conditionals
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 12, 2024
Orlando Espino, Isabel Orenes, and Sergío Moren-Rios present new work on illusory conditional inferences, which is now out in print at Memory & Cognition. Their new analysis focuses on how people reason about both conditionals (“if A...
Read MoreThe role of emotions in the maintenance and revision of beliefs
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 10, 2024
Monica Bucciarelli and Phil Johnson-Laird have two new papers on the role of deontic beliefs and emotions. In a new paper out in Sistemi Intelligenti, they examined the link between the strength of in a particular belief...
Read MoreEye movements are like gestures in the creation of informal algorithms
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 7, 2024
Robert Mackiewicz led a project (with Monica Bucciarelli, myself, and Phil Johnson-Laird) on how people comprehend informal programs, like the pseudo-program you might use to set a dinner table (all the placemats first, all the dining plates...
Read MoreWhat should replace the Turing Test? A commentary by Johnson-Laird and Ragni
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted December 6, 2023
Phil Johnson-Laird and Marco Ragni note in a new commentary published in Intelligent Computing that the Turing test, whose aim was to establish whether machines can think, is now obsolete: modern chatbots and AI tools can pass the...
Read MoreOur dearest Bruno Bara (1949-2023)
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted November 9, 2023
Bruno Bara, our dear friend and colleague, passed away on November 7th, 2023. Bara was warm, jovial, and brimming with energy and ideas. He made fundamental contributions to the study of deductive reasoning in collaboration with his...
Read MoreImpossible worlds and how people simulate them: new M&C paper by Byrne
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted October 3, 2023
Ruth Byrne published a new paper in Memory & Cognition that describes how people think of hypothetical impossibilities, such as: “if people were made of steel, they would not bruise easily”. Reasoners treat the conditional as true,...
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