Cognitive Science Colloquium - Sangeet Khemlani / Towards a unified process theory of human reasoning
Cognitive Science Colloquium - Sangeet Khemlani / Towards a unified process theory of human reasoning
Thursday December 5 we are joined by Sangeet Khemlani from the US Naval Research Laboratory, who will give the Cognitive Science Colloquium talk on his work modeling human reasoning in terms of iconic mental simulations - about quantification, conditionals, time, causation, knowledge and desires.
Toward a unified process theory of human reasoning
Cognitive scientists have proposed more than a dozen theories of syllogisms, deductions about simplified quantified descriptions of properties. Such theory proliferation reveals the science's failure to deliver a unified account of how humans think. A unified theory should explain why people are capable of reasoning accurately, and also why they often make predictable errors. It should also explain common mental processes that underlie human thinking and reasoning across many tasks and contexts. I describe efforts towards developing such a theory by introducing mReasoner, a computational cognitive process model that assumes that people interpret linguistic and perceptual information by constructing iconic mental simulations. For example, the system builds mental simulations to represent quantified assertions, so it can explain reasoning about syllogisms and related inferences. Its high-level algorithms implement abstract processes, and so it can also reason about causal, sentential, kinematic, and spatiotemporal information. And because mental simulations can be constructed from perceptual information, it's possible to use the system, not just as a cognitive model that explains laboratory data, but also as a representation engine that facilitates human-centric communicative tasks. I conclude by demonstrating how mReasoner can operate in the context of real-time, real-world human-machine teaming.