I was recently interviewed by Nina Bonderup Dohn and Marco Ragni at KI – Künstliche Intelligenz, a German journal of artificial intelligence. You can check out that interview here. Continue reading

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 computer scientists to describe specific types of programs, people without any background or training in computer science can… Continue reading

Hillary Harner and Laura Kelly successfully completed their NRC Postdoctoral Fellowships this Fall — congratulations to them both! Throughout their years at NRL, Laura and Hillary made some important discoveries into how people reason about durations and how they reason about desire. Laura Kelly‘s work in the Reasoning Lab focused on how people reason about… Continue reading

I’m extremely excited that Branden Bio began his postdoc at NRL this week! Dr. Bio is coming from Princeton’s Psychology Department, where he worked on studying attention, awareness, and its underlying neural mechanisms. His recent work focuses on how people attribute conscious states to others. He’s published papers in PNAS, eLife, and Cerebral Cortex. At… Continue reading

At this year’s CogSci 2021, the Reasoning Lab presented recent work, including: Laura Kelly’s research on how people build explanations to resolve inconsistencies in temporal premises (paper, video) Hillary Harner’s work on how they distinguish between desires and intentions (paper, video) Gordon Briggs and Hillary Harner’s work on preferences in people’s quantified descriptions of groups… Continue reading

The Reasoning Lab presented work on how people think and reason about time, durations, causality, bouletics, kinematics, and quantifiers at this year’s International Conference on Thinking 2021. For those who couldn’t make the conference, I’ve included an archive of the presentations here: 🎞 Directional biases in durative inference presented by Laura Kelly 🎞 The consistency… Continue reading

Phil Johnson-Laird and I recently published a deep dive into the mReasoner computational cognitive model and the new theory of reasoning about properties that it implements. We describe a new model based theory of reasoning about quantifiers, such as “all”, “some”, and “most”, as well as a series of simulation studies that show how the… Continue reading

I published a paper in Frontiers in Psychology with a team of researchers at NRL that includes Paul Bello, Gordon Briggs, Hillary Harner, and Christina Wasylyshyn on how people reason about omissive causations. They tend to reason with iconic possibilities that yield temporal inferences, and they tend to reason with one possibility at a time,… Continue reading

In a project lead by Paul Henne (Lake Forest College), we recently published a paper in Cognitive Science about how norms affect prospective causal judgments, i.e., judgments about whether a particular situation can cause a future event. Here’s the abstract: People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some… Continue reading

All explanations are incomplete, but some explanations are more complete than others — this is the central result of our recent work and some other research into explanatory reasoning (e.g., Zemla et al., 2017). Joanna Korman and I describe a new theory of explanatory reasoning now out in Acta Psychologica. Here’s the title: All explanations… Continue reading