Most natural domains can be represented in multiple ways: we can categorize foods in terms of their nutritional content or social role, animals in terms of their taxonomic groupings or their ecological niches, and musical instruments in terms of their taxonomic categories or social uses. Previous approaches to modeling human categorization have…

The mental model theory postulates that the meanings of assertions, and knowledge about their context can "modulate" the logical meaning of sentential connectives, such as "if" and "or". One known effect of modulation is to block the representation of possibilities to which a proposition refers. But, modulation should also add relational…

According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the…

The experience of causation is a pervasive product of the human mind. Moreover, the experience of causing an event alters subjective time: actions are perceived as temporally shifted towards their effects [Haggard, P., Clark, S., & Kalogeras, J. (2002). Voluntary action and conscious awareness. "Nature Neuroscience," 5(4), 382-385]. This temporal…

The time-course of representing others' perspectives is inconclusive across the currently available models of ToM processing. We report two visual-world studies investigating how knowledge about a character's basic preferences (e.g. "Tom's favourite colour is pink") and higher-order desires (his wish to keep this preference secret) compete to…

People's reactions to coincidences are often cited as an illustration of the irrationality of human reasoning about chance. We argue that coincidences may be better understood in terms of rational statistical inference, based on their functional role in processes of causal discovery and theory revision. We present a formal definition of…

Investigated whether infants infer that a hidden, freely moving object will move continuously and smoothly. Six- to 10- month olds inferred that the object's path would be connected and unobstructed, in accord with continuity. Younger infants did not infer this, in accord with inertia. At 8 and 10 months, knowledge of inertia emerged but remained…

Three experiments explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people were made by children and adults. Results indicated that children often predicted that people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological events. Older children…