How 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....
Read MoreNew research on factual and counterfactual conditionals
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted April 30, 2020
Orlando Espino and Ruth Byrne report two new papers on factual and counterfactual conditionals. In a paper now out in Cognitive Science, they show how counterfactual conditionals systematically suppress inferences. Here’s the abstract of their paper: We...
Read MoreProving the consistency of the model theory
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted April 30, 2020
Phil Johnson-Laird developed a new informal proof of the consistency of the model theory of sentential reasoning (Khemlani, Byrne, & Johnson-Laird, 2018). Here’s a relevant introductory excerpt: is the model theory of sentential reasoning consistent in the...
Read MoreRagni and Johnson-Laird ask: “Explanation or modeling?”
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted April 15, 2020
In the latest issue of Computational Brain & Behavior, Marco Ragni and Phil Johnson-Laird respond to recent criticism by Kellen and Klauer (same issue) about a meta-analysis of studies on the Wason selection task. Kellen and Klauer’s central points...
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