There is no agreement on what a mental model is and how to infer the mental model a person has. We are conducting research aimed at solving these problems by developing a model of Mental Model formation. Our basic hypothesis is that a Mental Model is a dynamic representation created in WM by combining information stored in LTM (the Conceptual Model) and characteristics extracted from the enviro...

To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object which disappears from sight, it is possible to exploit two different sources of information. One source is the memory of the last visible movement of the object, and the other is its inferred movement through time. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into dynamical analog mental representations. To investigate the nature o...

This study concerned the role of gestures that accompany discourse in deep learning processes. We assumed that co-speech gestures favor the construction of a complete mental representation of the discourse content, and we tested the predictions that a discourse accompanied by gestures, as compared with a discourse not accompanied by gestures, should result in better recollection of conceptual i...

Formal theories of mental representation have receded from the importance they had in the early days of cognitive science. I argue that such theories are crucial in any mental domain, not just for their own sake, but to guide experimental inquiry, as well as to integrate the domain into the mind as a whole. To illustrate the criteria of adequacy for theories of mental representation, I compare ...

Previous research suggests that people construct mental time lines to represent and reason about time. However, is the ability to represent space truly necessary for representing events along a mental time line? Our results are the first to demonstrate that deficits in spatial representation (as a function of left hemispatial neglect) also result in deficits in representing events along the men...

The paper introduces a knowledge engineering methodology to handle scenarios of inter-human interaction. We focus on the attitudes of the conflicting agents, building the formal framework for the representation of these scenarios as sequences of mental actions of the agents. Developed framework facilitates a domain-independent comparative analysis of the textual scenarios of inter-human interac...

We conducted a nonlinear analysis of fingertip pulse waves and found that the Lyapunov exponent having the “divergence” property of attractor trajectory was an effective index for estimating human mental health. We showed that this method is effective for an early detection of dementia and depression, as well as in the detection of changes in mental status. In addition, based on these results o...

In mental rotation, a mental representation of an object must be rotated while the actual object remains visible. Where is this representation stored while it is being rotated? To answer this question, observers were asked to perform a mental rotation task during the delay interval of a visual working memory task. When the working memory task required the storage of object features, substantial...

Patients with conversion disorder generally suffer from a severe neurological deficit which cannot be attributed to a structural neurological damage. In two patients with acute conversion paraplegia, investigation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that the insular cortex, a limbic-related cortex involved in body-representation and subjective emotional experience, was acti...