Mental simulation

Mental Simulation

According to the theory theory of folk psychology, our engagement in the folk psychological practices of prediction, interpretation and explanation draws on a rich body of knowledge about psychological matters. According to the simulation theory, in contrast, a fundamental role is played by our ability to identify with another person in imagination and to replicate or re-enact aspects of the ot...

Mental Simulation of Causality

We propose that people imagine alternatives to reality (counterfactuals) in assessing the causal role of a prior event. This process of mental simulation (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982) is used to derive novel predictions about the effects of default events on causal attribution. A default event is the alternative event that most readily comes to mind when a factual event is mentally mutated. The fa...

Mechanical reasoning by mental simulation.

Recent studies have provided evidence for mental simulation as a strategy in mechanical reasoning. This type of reasoning can be dissociated from reasoning based on descriptive knowledge in that it depends on different abilities and memory stores, is expressed more easily in gesture than in language, exhibits analog properties, and can result in correct inferences in situations where people do ...

Grammatical aspect and mental simulation.

When processing sentences about perceptible scenes and performable actions, language understanders activate perceptual and motor systems to perform mental simulations of those events. But little is known about exactly what linguistic elements activate modality-specific systems during language processing. While it is known that content words, like nouns and verbs, influence the content of a ment...

Running head: GENDER DIFFERENCES IN MENTAL SIMULATION