Thomas the loop engine: Learning to program computers with a toy train Anja Jamzorik recently featured our latest paper in Memory & Cognition for the The Psychonomics Society website; check it out!   Continue reading

When something happens bc something else didn’t occur, it’s called “omissive causation” — like when your phone dies because you didn’t charge it. Our new theory in Memory & Cognition predicts how people mentally simulate omissions. It predicts that people should prioritize possibilities corresponding to mental models of omissive causal relations, and that they should… Continue reading

I have a new paper out in Cognitive Science with Ruth Byrne and Phil Johnson-Laird. We developed a theory about “sentential reasoning”, which is the sort of reasoning that occurs when you think about sentences that are connected by words such as “and”, “or”, or “if.” Cognitive theories have yet to explain the process by… Continue reading

Joanna Korman will be presenting our theory on how people understand “teleological generalizations” at the next CogSci 2018 in Madison, WI later this year. Teleological generalizations are statements that cite the purpose or function of something, e.g., “Forks are for eating.” We sought to tackle the mystery of why some teleological generalizations make sense while… Continue reading

Interested in reasoning? The psychologists who study how humans do it don’t talk much with the scientists who get computers to do it. We’re trying to fix that: we put together a workshop that bridges the communities that study human and machine reasoning. Here are the details: Full Paper submission deadline: 25th of April, 2018… Continue reading

My colleague, Esube Bekele, recently presented our research on integrating deep learning (specifically, a person re-identification network) with an explanatory bias known as the “inherence bias”. The work was featured in the “Explainable Robotics Systems” workshop at HRI 2018. Here’s the paper, and here’s the abstract: Despite the remarkable progress in deep learning in recent… Continue reading

I gave at talk on omissive causation at the Workshop on Causal Reasoning, which was put together by Felipe de Brigard. The talk focused on recent collaborative work on how people represent and reason with omissive causes, e.g., “Not watering the plants caused them to die.” You can check out the slides here. Continue reading

Do you know absolutely nothing about reasoning? Wanna fix that? I have a new chapter out in the Stevens’ Handbook that summarizes the latest and greatest work on research into reasoning and higher level cognition. Here’s the link. Continue reading

I have a new chapter out that reviews how people use mental models to reason. You can read the chapter here, and the first couple paragraphs are available here: The theory of mental models has a long history going back to the logic diagrams of C.S. Peirce in the nineteenth century. But it was the… Continue reading