Groundbreaking study in Science Advances on how spatial education improves relational reasoning

Rob Cortes, a graduate student in Georgetown’s Psychology Department, led a team of researchers on a groundbreaking investigation, now out in Science Advances, on how spatial education in a real-world classroom context improves verbal reasoning. As they...

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Orenes et al. on eyetracking causal and counterfactual negation

Isabel Orenes, Orlando Espino, and Ruth Byrne published a new paper in QJEP on how people comprehend affirmative and negative counterfactuals and causal assertions. Their results corroborate the view that people understand counterfactuals by thinking about two...

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What it means to “want” something: A model-based theory

Hillary Harner spent much of her time in my group at NRL exploring how people comprehend the word “want”. In a new paper now out in Cognitive Science, we outline how people interpret and reason about want: they build...

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Beyond syllogisms: new computational theory in Psych Review on how people reason about properties

Phil Johnson-Laird and I describe an advance to the theory of mental models in a new paper out in Psychological Review. The theory and its computational model explain how people reason about inferences involving properties. Aristotle analyzed...

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Ruth Byrne awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal

For her groundbreaking contributions to cognitive science and the psychology of reasoning, Ruth Byrne was awarded a Gold Medal from the Royal Irish Academy. Congratulations to Ruth on this fantastic honor! A video of the ceremony is...

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Poetry, emotions, and mental models

Phil Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley describe how semantics, prosodic cues, and knowledge help individuals simulate mental models from poetic text. Their latest paper in Acta Psychologica presents a overarching theory of how poetry yields models that produce basic emotions, and...

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“Simulation” theory of abstract art

Phil Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley propose a new account in Art and Perception of how simulations underlie the perception of emotions for abstract artwork. They argue people mentally simulate actions and gestures corresponding to emotional states, and that...

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Recursion in programs, thought, and language

Phil Johnson-Laird, along with his collaborators Monica Bucciarelli, Robert Mackiewicz, and myself, published a paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that reviewed research into how humans consciously reason about recursive operations. Though the term “recursion” is often used by...

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M&C paper on negating counterfactual and semifactual conditionals

Orlando Espino, Isabel Orenes, and Sergio Moreno-Ríos recently investigated how people comprehend the negation of two distinct types of conditionals — counterfactuals and semifactuals — and published their results in Memory & Cognition. Their work shows that, like indicative...

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Dames et al. investigate the stability of syllogistic reasoning in T&R

Hannah Dames, Karl Christoph Klauer, and Marco Ragni published a paper in Thinking & Reasoning about the stability of syllogistic reasoning, i.e., how performance changes from one test to another. They find that reasoning ability isn’t inherently...

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