Sangeet Khemlani

My colleague, Esube Bekele, recently presented our research on integrating deep learning (specifically, a person re-identification network) with an explanatory bias known as the “inherence bias”. The work was featured in the “Explainable Robotics Systems” workshop at HRI 2018. Here’s the paper, and here’s the abstract: Despite the remarkable progress in deep learning in recent… Continue reading

I gave at talk on omissive causation at the Workshop on Causal Reasoning, which was put together by Felipe de Brigard. The talk focused on recent collaborative work on how people represent and reason with omissive causes, e.g., “Not watering the plants caused them to die.” You can check out the slides here. Continue reading

Do you know absolutely nothing about reasoning? Wanna fix that? I have a new chapter out in the Stevens’ Handbook that summarizes the latest and greatest work on research into reasoning and higher level cognition. Here’s the link. Continue reading

I have a new chapter out that reviews how people use mental models to reason. You can read the chapter here, and the first couple paragraphs are available here: The theory of mental models has a long history going back to the logic diagrams of C.S. Peirce in the nineteenth century. But it was the… Continue reading

Recently, the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review put together a special issue on the Process of Explanation (guest edited by Andrei Cimpian and Frank Keil). I read almost all the papers in the special issue — they’re excellent and well worth your time. I participated in a Digital Event (organized by Stephan Lewandowsky) where I synthesized some of the… Continue reading

Monica Bucciarelli, Robert Mackiewicz, Phil Johnson-Laird and I recently published a new paper in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology describing a theory of how children use mental simulations and gestures to reason about simple algorithms, such as reversing the order of items in list. Here’s a link to the paper, and here’s the abstract: Experiments showed… Continue reading

I have a new paper out in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience on a theory, computer model, and robotic implementation of event segmentation and temporal reasoning. The paper is with Tony Harrison and Greg Trafton. Here’s the link and here’s the abstract: We describe a novel computational theory of how individuals segment perceptual information into representations of events.… Continue reading

I’ve been doing a bit of work on causal reasoning lately with my colleagues, Paul Bello, Geoff Goodwin, and Phil Johnson-Laird. Here are links to three papers that I’ll be presenting at CogSci 2015 in Pasadena, CA later this summer: Bello, P., Khemlani, S. A model-based theory of omissive causation. Khemlani, S., Goodwin, G., Johnson-Laird,… Continue reading

I wrote a paper with Phil Johnson-Laird and Geoff Goodwin that reviews recent developments in theories of human reasoning. It seeks to explain how logic and probability fit together with cognitive processes of inference. You can download it here, and here’s the abstract: This review addresses the long-standing puzzle of how logic and probability fit… Continue reading

I published a computational model of immediate quantification inferences in QJEP with my co-authors, Max Lotstein, Greg Trafton, and Phil Johnson-Laird. You can download it here, and here’s the abstract: We propose a theory of immediate inferences from assertions containing a single quantifier, such as: All of the artists are bakers; therefore, some of the… Continue reading