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

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