Poetry, 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...
Read MoreNew paper on negation and counterfactual reasoning out in Current Psychology
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted October 23, 2021
Jesica Gómez-Sánchez and her colleagues Sergio Moreno-Ríos and Caren Frosch recently published a new paper in Current Psychology on how counterfactual reasoning interacts with thinking about negation. They find that both children and adults construct counterfactuals that serve as...
Read MoreReasoning with counterintuitive and arbitrary conditionals
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted September 29, 2021
In recent years, arbitrary conditionals such as, “If a person goes shopping, then that person gets pimples”, have challenged many existing accounts of conditional reasoning. Estefania Gazzo Castañeda and Markus Knauff recently published new data shedding light...
Read MoreIsabel Orenes on perceiving negations
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted September 25, 2021
Isabel Orenes published a new paper in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research on how people perceive negative sentences. She reports on eye-tracking data that suggest that people have an easier time processing symbolic representations rather than iconic simulations....
Read MoreChapter on rational deductions in the Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 31, 2021
Phil Johnson-Laird released a new chapter coming out in the Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality on the model theory and how it establishes principles of rationality. Here is an excerpt from the chapter: Can naïve individuals – those who...
Read MorePaper on free choice permissions, paradoxes, and disjunctive reasoning now out in JCP
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 31, 2021
Phil Johnson-Laird, Cristina Quelas, and Celia Rasga publised a paper in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology titled “The mental model theory of free choice permissions and paradoxical disjunctive inferences”. The paper addresses paradoxes of free choice, as in: You can...
Read More