Ambiguity detection and mental models of discourse
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 22, 2024
A new study by Calvin Laursen, Timothy Slattery, Martin Vassilev, and Jan Wiener, all from Bournemouth University, examines how people detect ambiguities in naturalistic texts. They show that participants often fail to detect ambiguities in descriptions when...
Read MoreWelcome, Selina Koralus!
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in Events
- posted May 20, 2024
Philipp and Jenny Koralus recently welcomed their baby daughter Selina! Congratulations to them both, and many warm wishes to the new parents from all your friends!
Read MoreThe role of emotions in the maintenance and revision of beliefs
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 10, 2024
Monica Bucciarelli and Phil Johnson-Laird have two new papers on the role of deontic beliefs and emotions. In a new paper out in Sistemi Intelligenti, they examined the link between the strength of in a particular belief...
Read MoreEye movements are like gestures in the creation of informal algorithms
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted May 7, 2024
Robert Mackiewicz led a project (with Monica Bucciarelli, myself, and Phil Johnson-Laird) on how people comprehend informal programs, like the pseudo-program you might use to set a dinner table (all the placemats first, all the dining plates...
Read MoreWhat should replace the Turing Test? A commentary by Johnson-Laird and Ragni
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted December 6, 2023
Phil Johnson-Laird and Marco Ragni note in a new commentary published in Intelligent Computing that the Turing test, whose aim was to establish whether machines can think, is now obsolete: modern chatbots and AI tools can pass the...
Read MoreOur dearest Bruno Bara (1949-2023)
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted November 9, 2023
Bruno Bara, our dear friend and colleague, passed away on November 7th, 2023. Bara was warm, jovial, and brimming with energy and ideas. He made fundamental contributions to the study of deductive reasoning in collaboration with his...
Read MoreImpossible worlds and how people simulate them: new M&C paper by Byrne
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted October 3, 2023
Ruth Byrne published a new paper in Memory & Cognition that describes how people think of hypothetical impossibilities, such as: “if people were made of steel, they would not bruise easily”. Reasoners treat the conditional as true,...
Read MoreCelebrating Phil Johnson-Laird and 40 years of mental models research
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 2, 2023
In late July 2023, a meeting at University College London was held to honor Phil Johnson-Laird on the 40th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking book, Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and...
Read MoreHow people mentally represent order and equivalence
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted February 14, 2023
Recent work by Ulrich von Hecker (Cardiff University) and colleagues investigated the impact of relational semantics on mental models and their structural properties. Their studies reveal a reversal of the symbolic distance effect (SDE), which typically indicates...
Read MoreMotor imagery and engagement favour spatial reasoning
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted December 2, 2022
Francesco Ianì and his colleagues published new studies in Memory & Cognition on how motor imagery engages spatial reasoning, in line with the idea that spatial reasoning depends on constructing and maintaining mental models. Their abstract is here:...
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