Gordon Briggs and I presented a new computational model and a novel dataset on how people make generative causal deductions at this year’s International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (ICCM). For instance, if you know that habituation causes seriation and that seriation prevents methylation, you don’t need to know what all those words mean in order… Continue reading

Hillary Harner presented our latest work on teleological generics at SPP. The abstract of her work is available here: People can describe generalizations about the functions of objects by producing teleological generic language, i.e. those statements that express generalities about the purposes of objects. People accept teleological generics such as eyes are for seeing and… Continue reading

Laura Kelly presented new research on reasoning about durations at the 2019 London Reasoning Workshop. The abstract of her talk is here: Few experiments have examined how people reason about durative relations, e.g., “during”. Such relations pose challenges to present theories of reasoning, but many researchers argue that people simulate a mental timeline when they… Continue reading

A major failure of current AI systems is that they can’t mimic common sense reasoning: most ML systems don’t reason, and all theorem provers draw trivial and silly deductions. We analyze why — and suggest a path forward — in a new paper now out in German AI journal Künstliche Intelligenz: AI has never come… Continue reading

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