López-Astorga et al. review the probability of conditionals in PBR

Miguel López-Astorga, Marco Ragni, and Phil Johnson-Laird present a new review on the probability of conditionals in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: their analysis focuses on the psychological plausibility of the proposal that the probability of expressions such as if...

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Mental models symposia at the International Conference on Thinking 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...

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Strategies in social reasoning and on disconfirming belief in false claims

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...

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Omissive causation and the model theory

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...

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How children and adults keep track of real information when thinking counterfactually

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,...

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Espino and Byrne on counterfactuals, reality monitoring, and imagination

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...

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The model theory explains how people reason about durations

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...

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New theory on explanatory completeness

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...

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Ragni joins the Danish Institute of Advanced Study

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...

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Mental models use common neural spatial structure for spatial and abstract content

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...

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