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28Split identity: Intransitive judgments of the identity of objectsCognition 119 (3): 356-373. 2011.Identity is a transitive relation, according to all standard accounts. Necessarily, if x = y and y = z, then x = z. However, people sometimes say that two objects, x and z, are the same as a third, y, even when x and z have different properties (thus, x = y and y = z, but x ≠ z). In the present experiments, participants read stories about an iceberg that breaks into two icebergs, one to the east and the other to the west. Many participants (32–54%, in baseline conditions across experiments) deci…Read more
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24Five-month-old infants have expectations for the accumulation of nonsolid substancesCognition 175 (C): 1-10. 2018.
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23Lines of Thought: Central Concepts in Cognitive PsychologyOup Usa. 2011.Lines of Thought addresses how we are able to think about abstract possibilities: How can we think about math, despite the immateriality of numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities? How are we able to think about what might have happened if history had taken a different turn? Questions like these turn up in nearly every part of cognitive science, and they are central to our human position of having only limited knowledge concerning what is or might be true.
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22Norms, competence, and the explanation of reasoningBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3): 501. 1983.
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16Parts of activities: Reply to Fellbaum and Miller (1990)Psychological Review 97 (4): 571-575. 1990.If people believe that one activity is a kind of another, they also tend to believe that the second activity is a part of the first. For example, they assert that deciding is a kind of thinking and that thinking is a part of deciding. C. Fellbaum and G. A. Miller's (see record 1991-03356-001) explanation for this phenomenon is based on the idea that people interpret part of in the domain of verbs as a type of logical entailment. Their explanation, however, suffers from at least 2 deficiencies. F…Read more
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15Set-theoretic and network models reconsidered: A comment on Hollan's "Features and semantic memory."Psychological Review 82 (2): 156-157. 1975.
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14Children's Understanding of the Natural Numbers’ StructureCognitive Science 42 (6): 1945-1973. 2018.When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between “5” and “10” is larger than the distance between “75” and “80.” This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, 2010; Siegler & Opfer, 2003). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth &…Read more
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14Paralogical reasoning: Evans, Johnson-Laird, and Byrne on liar and truth-teller puzzlesCognition 36 (3): 291-314. 1990.
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14The Psychology of Proof: Deductive Reasoning in Human ThinkingMIT Press. 1994.Lance Rips describes a unified theory of natural deductive reasoning and fashions a working model of deduction, with strong experimental support, that is capable of playing a central role in mental life.
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12Explanation and Evidence in Informal ArgumentCognitive Science 24 (4): 573-604. 2000.A substantial body of evidence shows that people tend to rely too heavily on explanations when trying to justify an opinion. Some research suggests these errors may arise from an inability to distinguish between explanations and the evidence that bears upon them. We examine an alternative account, that many people do distinguish between explanations and evidence, but rely more heavily on unsubstantiated explanations when evidence is scarce or absent. We examine the philosophical and psychologica…Read more
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1ReasoningIn William Bechtel & George Graham (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science, Blackwell. 2017.To a first approximation, cognitive science agrees with everyday notions about reasoning: According to both views, reasoning is a special sort of relation between beliefs – a relation that holds when accepting (or rejecting) one or more beliefs causes others to be accepted (rejected). If you learn, for example, that everyone dislikes iguana pudding, that should increase the likelihood of your believing that Calvin, in particular, dislikes iguana pudding. Reasoning could produce an entirely new b…Read more