Our paper on domino effects in causation is now out in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology — the paper shows that when you contradict a node in a causal chain (e.g., A in A caused B and B caused C), the rest of the chain topples like falling dominoes. The results support the idea… Continue reading

A new paper by Laura Kelly, myself, and Phil Johnson-Laird (link) describes systematic reasoning errors when people assess the consistency of durative temporal relations, as in the sentence: the sale happened during the convention. The paper is out in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience for their special issue titled “Mental Models in Time”, edited by… Continue reading

The Reasoning Lab presented work at the CogSci 2020 virtual conference this year, including research on temporal reasoning, reasoning about desire, genericity and semantic memory, teleology and agency, and quantification. Here’s an archive of the presentations: Gordon Briggs and Hillary Harner speak about how people generate descriptions that include quantifiers Laura Kelly talks about systematic… Continue reading

I gave a talk titled, “Leveraging conceptual constraints for interactive robotics” at an RSS 2020 workshop, AI & Its Alternatives in Assistive and Collaborative Robotics: Decoding Intent, organized by Deepak Gopinath, Ola Kalinowska, Mahdieh Nejati, Katarina Popovic, Brenna Argall, and Tood Murphey. Here’s the video of the talk: Continue reading

Zach Horne will join the faculty at the University of Edinburgh in the winter semester, 2021. Congratulations, Zach! Continue reading

Congrats to Joanna Korman (http://joko-cogsci.com/), who’ll be starting as an Assistant Professor at Bentley University this fall! Continue reading

I wrote a new chapter on the psychology of syllogistic reasoning in the forthcoming Handbook of Rationality that summarizes recent advances in the field. Here’s a quick summary: Psychologists have studied syllogistic inferences for more than a century, because they can serve as a microcosm of human rationality. “Syllogisms” is a term that refers to… Continue reading

Joanna Korman and I have a new paper out in Cognition that examines statements such as “cars are for driving”. The statement is interesting, because people tend to accept it, though they reject statements such as “cars are for parking”, even though you park cars just as often as you drive them. Such statements are… Continue reading

Hillary Harner will present a paper by Gordon Briggs, herself, Christina Wasylyshyn, Paul Bello, and myself titled “Neither the time nor the place: Omissive causes yield temporal inferences” at this year’s International Workshop on AI and Cognition (AIC 2019). The paper describes an oddity in reasoning about “omissive causes” — situations when something happens as… Continue reading

I presented work by Neha Bhat on how to leverage object detection algorithms to build spatial mental models at the 2019 London Reasoning Workshop. The abstract is here: We describe a novel computational system that processes images in order to dynamically construct and update iconic spatial simulations of the world — the equivalent of perceptual… Continue reading