Impossible 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,...
Read MoreCelebrating Phil Johnson-Laird and 40 years of mental models research
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 2, 2023
In late July 2023, a meeting at University College London was held to honor Phil Johnson-Laird on the 40th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking book, Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and...
Read MoreHow people mentally represent order and equivalence
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted February 14, 2023
Recent work by Ulrich von Hecker (Cardiff University) and colleagues investigated the impact of relational semantics on mental models and their structural properties. Their studies reveal a reversal of the symbolic distance effect (SDE), which typically indicates...
Read MoreMotor imagery and engagement favour spatial reasoning
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted December 2, 2022
Francesco Ianì and his colleagues published new studies in Memory & Cognition on how motor imagery engages spatial reasoning, in line with the idea that spatial reasoning depends on constructing and maintaining mental models. Their abstract is here:...
Read MoreReasoning as a tool
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted November 12, 2022
A new commentary by Amelia Gangemi, out in Exploring Contextualism and Performativity, argues that reasoning is a tool that serves individual goals. Gangemi makes the point that rationality is not a one-size-fits-all delineation, but that rationality helps people achieve their...
Read MoreGroundbreaking 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...
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