Mental models symposia at the International Conference on Thinking 2021
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in Events
- posted June 21, 2021
At the International Conference on Thinking, we’ve organized two symposia on mental models in thinking and reasoning. The conference includes presentations by: Gordon Briggs Monica Bucciarelli Ruth Byrne Hillary Harner Philipp Koralus Robert Mackiewicz Isabel Orenes Marco...
Read MoreStrategies in social reasoning and on disconfirming belief in false claims
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted June 8, 2021
A pair of new papers from Henry Markovits’ laboratory at UQAM focus on reasoning strategies in everyday social contexts. In a new paper in JEP:G, Émile Gagnon-St-Pierre and colleagues show how individual differences in the ability to...
Read MoreOmissive causation and the model theory
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted February 21, 2021
My colleagues and I recently published a paper in Frontiers in Psychology on “omissive causation”, i.e., causation that concerns non-events, as in, not charging your cellphone caused its battery to die. We tested the predictions of the model theory against...
Read MoreHow children and adults keep track of real information when thinking counterfactually
- by Sergio Moreno-Ríos
- in News
- posted December 4, 2020
Researchers at the University of Granada recently published a paper in PLOS ONE on how children and adults keep track of real information when they think about counterfactuals. The authors, who include Jesica Gómez-Sánchez, José Antonio Ruiz-Ballesteros,...
Read MoreEspino and Byrne on counterfactuals, reality monitoring, and imagination
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted November 4, 2020
Orlando Espino and Ruth Byrne published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition on how people comprehend counterfactuals such as, “If it had been a good year, there would have been roses.” To...
Read MoreThe model theory explains how people reason about durations
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 29, 2020
A paper by Laura Kelly, myself, and Phil Johnson-Laird is now out in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. It’s part of the journal’s special issue of Mental Models in Time, which was organized by Virginie van Wassenhove. The...
Read MoreNew theory on explanatory completeness
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 1, 2020
Joanna Korman and I recently published a paper in Acta Psychologica that introduces a new model-based theory on how people judge whether one explanation is more complete than another. The paper introduces both the theory as well as five...
Read MoreRagni joins the Danish Institute of Advanced Study
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted July 21, 2020
Congratulations to Marco Ragni, who will start at the Danish Institute of Advanced Study in August with a joint appointment at the University of Southern Denmark! He will continue to lead the Cognitive Computation Lab at the...
Read MoreMental models use common neural spatial structure for spatial and abstract content
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted June 8, 2020
Kay Alfred and colleagues (Dartmouth U.) present a new paper in Communications Biology on how spatial and abstract content implicates common neural structures traceable to model-based thinking. The abstract is here: Mental models provide a cognitive framework...
Read MoreMunroe on reasoning, rationality, and representation
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 1, 2020
In a new paper out in Synthese, Wade Munroe of the University of Michigan argues that mental models best characterize the mental operations that underlie reasoning and also help explain how to rationally update attitudes and beliefs....
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