As people study more facts about a concept, it takes longer to retrieve a particular fact about that concept. This fan effect (Anderson, 1974) has been attributed to competition among associations to a concept. Alternatively, the mental-model theory (Radvansky & Zacks, 1991) suggests that the fan effect disappears when the related concepts are organized into a single mental model. In the presen...

Theory refinement is the task of updating a domain theory in the light of new cases, to be done automatically or with some expert as­ sistance. The problem of theory refinement under uncertainty is reviewed here in the con­ text of Bayesian statistics, a theory of belief revision. The problem is reduced to an incre­ mental learning task as follows: the learning system is initially primed with a...

Mental Space Theory (Fauconnier, 1985) encompasses a wide variety of complex linguistics phenomena that are largely ignored in today’s natural language processing systems. These phenomena include conditionals (e.g. If sentences), embedded discourse, and other natural language utterances whose interpretation depends on cognitive partitioning of contextual knowledge. A unification-based formalism...

This paper continues our earlier investigation of autistic children's deficit in attributing beliefs to others--in their "theory of mind." Three experiments are reported. The first tests the prediction that autistic children will fail to distinguish mental and physical entities. The second tests the prediction that they will also be unaware of the mental function of the brain. The third tests t...

Developmental changes in children's understanding of mind and emotion and their mental-state talk in conversations with friends were examined in a longitudinal study of 50 children (M age at each time point = 3 years 11 months, 4 years 6 months, 5 years 0 months). Significant and related improvements over time were found for both theory-of-mind task performance and affective perspective taking....

What underlies our ability to attribute mental states to ourselves? In this paper I will focus on theoretical approaches to self-mindreading that posit a monitoring mechanism which detects the presence of certain kinds of mental states. I will discuss perhaps the most influential version of such a theory, proposed by Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stitch. I will discuss an influential objection to t...

Causal composition allows people to generate new causal relations by combining existing causal knowledge. We introduce a new computational model of such reasoning, the force theory, which holds that people compose causal relations by simulating the processes that join forces in the world, and compare this theory with the mental model theory (Khemlani et al., 2014) and the causal model theory (S...

A basic task in spreadsheet analysis in order to understand the structure of a given spreadsheet is that of finding precedent cells (cells that are referenced in the formula of a given cell). The cognitive fit theory is used to analyze this task. Current applications of the cognitive fit theory assert a fit when the information emphasized by the task matches the information emphasized by the pr...

Recent research debates the effects of exposure to narrative fiction on recognition of mental states in others and self, referred to as Theory of Mind. The current study explores the mechanisms by which such effects could occur in fictional film. Using manipulated film scenes, we conducted a between subject experiment (N = 136) exploring how film shot-scale affects viewers' Theory of Mind. Spec...

A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey's premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental...