Ecological and evolutionary validity: comments on Johnson-Laird, Legrenzi, Girotto, Legrenzi, and Caverni's (1999) mental-model theory of extensional reasoning.

Naive probability: a mental model theory of extensional reasoning.

This article outlines a theory of naive probability. According to the theory, individuals who are unfamiliar with the probability calculus can infer the probabilities of events in an extensional way: They construct mental models of what is true in the various possibilities. Each model represents an equiprobable alternative unless individuals have beliefs to the contrary, in which case some mode...

Vittorio Girotto

Illusions in reasoning about consistency.

Reasoners succumb to predictable illusions in evaluating whether sets of assertions are consistent. We report two studies of this computationally intractable task of "satisfiability." The results show that as the number of possibilities compatible with the assertions increases, the difficulty of the task increases, and that reasoners represent what is true according to assertions, not what is f...

Models of consistency.

This article presents a theory of how individuals detect whether descriptions of an entity are consistent or inconsistent. The theory postulates that individuals try to construct a mental model of the entity in which all the propositions are true. If they succeed, they infer that the description is consistent; otherwise, they infer that it is inconsistent. We report three experiments that corro...

Familiarity Effects and Questioning Biases in Human Belief Revision

Belief revision is the process by which one alters his or her belief state in the face of contradicting evidence. The contradictions typically arise from a set of statements in which not all propositions can be true at the same time. Despite widespread agreement that people have little difficulty finding such inconsistency, we still lack sufficient knowledge on how people revise their beliefs t...