Human Logic in Spatial Reasoning

In recent years a number of empirical results indicate that humans tend to use mental models during the reasoning process. This theory claims that humans represent and reason about spatial information by constructing, inspecting, and generating alternative models to check for a putative conclusion. New results about preferred models and local transformations made it necessary to refine the classical theory. From a formal perspective, however, a number of technical questions w.r.t. the explicit details of the theory are still unanswered. In this paper we formally ground the preferred mental model theory with the help of formal logic. This formalization allows to show inherent differences between formal and human reasoning and allows to identify a source of human errors in reasoning.