This article presents a theory of how individuals reason from inconsistency to consistency. The theory is based on 3 main principles. First, individuals try to construct a single mental model of a possibility that satisfies a current set of propositions, and if the task is impossible, they infer that the set is inconsistent. Second, when an inconsistency arises from an incontrovertible fact, th...

The theory of mental models postulates that conditionals of the sort, if A then C, have a "core" meaning referring to three possibilities: A and C, not-A and C, and not-A and not-C. The meaning of a conditional's clauses and general knowledge can modulate this meaning, blocking certain possibilities or adding relations between the clauses. Four experiments investigated such interpretations in f...

Relations can hold between relations, as in assertions such as: Cordelia loves Lear more than Goneril does. Naïve reasoners can make inferences that depend on these higher order relations, which are vital for science and mathematics, but no existing theory explains such inferences. The present paper presents a theory based on mental models of the situations under description, and it reports fou...

Interpersonal coordination is a key factor in team performance. In interactive team sports, the limited predictability of a constantly changing context makes coordination challenging. Approaches that highlight the support provided by environmental information and theories of shared mental models provide potential explanations of how interpersonal coordination can nonetheless be established. In ...

We have recently proposed a dual-route model of the effect of head orientation on perceived gaze direction (Otsuka, Mareschal, Calder, & Clifford, 2014; Otsuka, Mareschal, & Clifford, 2015), which computes perceived gaze direction as a linear combination of eye orientation and head orientation. By parametrically manipulating eye orientation and head orientation, we tested the adequacy of a line...

Discourse processing depends on long-term semantic memory and discourse memory (i.e. the organization and maintenance of a mental model). Using event-related potentials, the information-processing functions of the activities manifested by a centroparietal negativity (N400) and a posterior positivity (P600) were investigated during the processing of inferences. On the basis of findings from sema...

A new choice task was used to explore infants' spontaneous representations of more and less. Ten- and 12-month-old infants saw crackers placed sequentially into two containers, then were allowed to crawl and obtain the crackers from the container they chose. Infants chose the larger quantity with comparisons of 1 versus 2 and 2 versus 3, but failed with comparisons of 3 versus 4, 2 versus 4, an...

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in children's speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this p...