Philip N. Johnson-Laird Dept of Psychology, Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. e-mail: [email protected] In a civil action, an expert witness conceded two points: If a pollutant (TCE) had come from the river, it would be in the river bed. TCE was not in the river bed. The opposing lawyer claimed: The pattern is consistent with the conclusion that no TCE came from the r...

Searching for alternative solutions of an indeterminate reasoning task is an important and necessary step in order to draw certain inferences as in the case of deduction. To elucidate the underlying mental representations and processes of the search for alternatives in spatial reasoning, an experiment was conducted that used specific material stemming from AI research of Qualitative Spatial Rea...

We report five experiments investigating reasoning based on temporal relations, such as: "John takes a shower before he drinks coffee". How individuals make temporal inferences has not been studied hitherto, but we conjectured that they construct mental models of events, and we developed a computer program that reasons in this way. As the program shows, a problem of the form: a before b b befor...

This paper outlines the theory of reasoning based on mental models, and then shows how this theory might be extended to deal with probabilistic thinking. The same explanatory framework accommodates deduction and induction: there are both deductive and inductive inferences that yield probabilistic conclusions. The framework yields a theoretical conception of strength of inference, that is, a the...

Cognitive psychology suggests that a mental-model consists of two major components: knowledge structures (schema) and processes for using this knowledge (mental operations). A major concern of instructional design is the representation and organization of subject matter content to facilitate learning. The thesis of this paper is that the careful analysis of subject matter content (knowledge) ca...

Johnson-Laird & Byrne (J-L & B) are equivocal concerning the scope of mental-model theory. On the one hand, they are careful to note that mental models are aimed primarily at explaining deduction, although commonsense inference is not deductive in character. On the other hand, they contend that mental-model theory solves the problem of nonmonotonic reasoning, which is not deductive and is chara...

ZHANG, TAO. Using Measures of Situation Awareness to Characterize Mental Models in Inductive Reasoning Tasks. (Under the direction of Dr. David B. Kaber.) Mental models have been proposed in both the cognitive psychology and human factors literature. However, they have been applied for a variety of related but distinct representations. For system design and user training in practical applicatio...