Groundbreaking study in Science Advances on how spatial education improves relational reasoning
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 14, 2022
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...
Read MoreOrenes et al. on eyetracking causal and counterfactual negation
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted July 10, 2022
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...
Read MoreWhat it means to “want” something: A model-based theory
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted June 10, 2022
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...
Read MoreBeyond syllogisms: new computational theory in Psych Review on how people reason about properties
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 2, 2022
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...
Read MoreRuth Byrne awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted April 4, 2022
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...
Read MorePoetry, emotions, and mental models
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted February 15, 2022
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...
Read More“Simulation” theory of abstract art
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted February 14, 2022
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...
Read MoreRecursion in programs, thought, and language
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted December 21, 2021
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...
Read MoreM&C paper on negating counterfactual and semifactual conditionals
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted November 21, 2021
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...
Read MoreDames et al. investigate the stability of syllogistic reasoning in T&R
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted November 1, 2021
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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