People appear to exhibit a systematic bias in explanatory reasoning, called the “narrow latent scope bias”. Danny Oppenheimer, Abby Sussman and I first investigated the bias in 2011, and follow up investigations by Sam Johnson, Frank Keil, and their colleagues corroborated and extended much of what we discovered. A recent paper critiqued how robust the… Continue reading

Maria Kon, Andrew Lovett, and I have been investigating the way people perceive and comprehend the notion of a “chase”, and we recently published our explorations in the proceedings of CogSci 2024. In one project, the three of us examined how people interpret a chase relation between dynamically moving objects (circles) on a screen. We… Continue reading

Ruth Byrne and I organized a symposium at this year’s International Conference on Thinking 2024, and it included talks by Byrne, Jeff Zemla, Emily Liquin, and myself. Here’s the full abstract of the workshop: Explanations are the by-products of comprehension; you’ve mastered an idea only once you can explain it properly. Belief in a particular… Continue reading

Hillary Harner and I have a new paper out in Cognitive Development that describes a corpus analysis we ran on how children learn the use the word “want”. “Want” is among the first mental state verbs that kids can articulate, and so tracking the development of its patterns of production could help shed some light… Continue reading

I recently wrote a feature for The Reasoner (edited by Hykel Hosni) that described the introductory chapter of The Handbook of Rationality (MIT Press). Both the feature (http://www.thereasoner.org/) and the entire volume of the handbook (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045070/the-handbook-of-rationality/) are freely available online. Continue reading

Phil Johnson-Laird, Ruth Byrne and I recently published a paper in PNAS on how people base their verifications of assertions (such as Tom visited Florida or Wyoming) on non-logical truth values: while binary logics stipulate truth values of true and false, and nothing more, humans comprehend truth values such as true and it couldn’t have… Continue reading

Branden Bio and I recently published two papers at CogSci 2023 that focus on how people reason about mental states. The papers focus on two patterns we recently discovered: people’s online and offline knowledge interact, and they exhibit a systematic pattern of errors when reasoning about mental states. Continue reading

It may require some effortful thinking and some background knowledge to construct a plausible explanation from scratch, so you need a good reason to do so. One of the most important reasons for why people generate explanations is to resolve inconsistencies. Previous research showed as much: when faced with some inconsistent causal information, reasoners spontaneously… Continue reading

Phil Johnson-Laird and I have a new paper the describes a theory and computational model of how people reason about properties. The theory holds that people construct small-scale mental simulations of entities linked to their properties, and that the more mental simulations they build, the harder a problem will be. A computer model, mReasoner, simulates… Continue reading

Hillary Harner and I have a new theoretical paper out in Cognitive Science on the processes and mental representations people rely on to reason about desire. The paper shows that people think of desires as “counterfactive” — A wants X implies that X isn’t the case by default. It also shows that people separate desires… Continue reading