Spatial conditionals and illusory inferences

Studies of reasoning often concern specialised domains such as conditional inferences or transitive inferences, but descriptions often cut across such domains, for example: If the circle is to the left of the square then the triangle is to the right of the square. The square is to the right of the circle. The triangle is to the right of the square. Could all three of these assertions be true at the same time? We report four experiments testing the mental model theory of such problems, which combine spatial transitivity and conditional relations. It predicts that reasoners should try to find a single mental model in which all the assertion hold: