Keith Stenning

University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Informatics

It shows the implementability of fast and frugal heuristics via a transparent non-monotonic logic programme as well as the reversibility of this process.

The notion of “bounded rationality” was introduced by Simon as an appropriate framework for explaining how agents reason and make decisions in accordance with their computational limitations and the characteristics of the environments in which they exist (seen metaphorically as two complementary scissor blades).We elaborate on how bounded rationali...

Simon's legacies for Mathematics education are briefly explained with examples-.

We report on a study on syllogistic reasoning conceived with the idea that subjects' performance in experiments is highly dependent on the communicative situations in which the particular task is framed. From this perspective, we describe the results of Experiment 1 comparing the performance of undergraduate students in 5 different tasks. This betw...

We report on a study conceived with the idea that the use of logic in regard to mathematical reasoning as it actually occurs in practice is not limited to its prominent role in formal deductions and proofs. Interpretation of different mathematical situations elicits in fact the use of mostly unconscious forms of reasoning, close to those of narrati...

Under review for the 'Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning in Autism', edited by Ruth Byrne and Kinga Morsanyi

Alternative logics have been invoked periodically to explain the systematically different modes of thought of the subjects of ethnography: one logic for ‘us’ and another for ‘them’. Recently anthropologists have cast doubt on the tenability of such an explanation of difference. In cognitive science, [Stenning and van Lambalgen, 2008] proposed that wi...

This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty (and even more, that there are kinds of uncertainty which are for principled reasons not addressable with probabilistic means); and to provide evidence that logic-based methods can well support reasoning with uncertainty. For the latter...

This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty (and even more, that there are kinds of uncertainty which are for principled reasons not addressable with probabilistic means); and to provide evidence that logic-based methods can well support reasoning with uncertainty. For the latter...

Cummins (1995) had subjects generate explanations of failures of naive causal conditional inferences, and showed that the heuristic “tallying” of inference defeaters thus generated, inversely predicts other subjects judgments of confidence in those inferences. This is the basis for a probability-free computational model of simple heuristic naive ca...

We sketch a theory of creativity which centres on the framing of activity by repetitive thinking and action, and sees creativity as divergences from these routines which is thereby framed against them. Without a repetitive frame creativity is impossible. Mere repetition is not creative, even if new. Creativity disrupts a frame, purposefully. Socrat...

This reply to Oaksford and Chater’s (O&C)’s critical discussion of our use of logic programming (LP) to model and predict patterns of conditional reasoning will frame the dispute in terms of the semantics of the conditional. We begin by outlining some common features of LP and probabilistic conditionals in knowledge-rich reasoning over long-term me...

Deliverable 2.3.2 is the final installment of a document detailing the C 2 Learn Co-creativity Assessment Methodology, its rationale, method, tools and accompanying operationalisation. Led by the UEDIN team in close collaboration with the OU team, and other appropriate consortium members, it sets out the over-arching theoretical frame of the projec...

This paper argues that the goals people have when reasoning determine their own norms of reasoning. A radical descriptivism which avoids norms never worked for any science; nor can it work for the psychology of reasoning. Norms as we understand them are illustrated with examples from categorical syllogistic reasoning and the “new paradigm” of subje...

Deliverable 5.4.1 is the first installment of a document describing the outcomes of Co-creativity Evaluation Analysis of data and information gathered through the pilot activities (M21 cycle), following the methodology defined by T2.3. Led by the UEDIN team, in close collaboration with OU, EA and BMUKK it sets out in detail the qualitative and quan...

Carroll Lewis (pseudonym), Das Spiel der Logik, Germam Translation by Micheal Zöllner of 671, Edited and with an afterword by Good Paul . Tropen Verlag, Cologne, and Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart, 1998, 199 pp. Good Paul , Logik—ein Spiel, Therein, pp. 103–119. - Volume 64 Issue 3 - Keith Stenning

Computational theories of mind assume that subjects interpret information, and then reason from those interpretations. Research on interpretation in deductive reasoning has claimed to show that subjects' interpretation of single syllogistic premises in an `immediate inference' task is radically different from their interpretation of pairs of the s...

Several of Beller, Bender, and Medin's (2012) issues are as relevant within cognitive science as between it and anthropology. Knowledge-rich human mental processes impose hermeneutic tasks, both on subjects and researchers. Psychology's current philosophy of science is ill suited to analyzing these: Its demand for ''stimulus control'' needs to give...

There are individual differences in reasoning which go beyond dimensions of ability. Valid models of cognition must take these differences into account, otherwise they characterise group mean phenomena which explain nobody. The gap is closing between formal cognitive models, which are designed from the ground up to explain cognitive phenomena, and...

Interpretation processes are necessary, whether one then applies probability theory or some other logic in reasoning from the resulting interpretations. In the case of suppression, understood in probabilistic terms, interpretation shows up as the necessity to change one's probabilities in ways not sanctioned by Bayesianism. This chapter argues that...

Brendan O. McGonigle received a BA (in 1961) and a PhD (in 1964) from Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He arrived at Durham University as a postdoc in 1965, where he became friends with David McFarland. By 1966 they both found themselves at the Institute of Experimental Psychology, Oxford, where they worked together on some problems o...

Contemporary biology understands macro-evolutionary steps as changes in developmental processes: the timing and placement of the expression of genes and their interactions through the environment. This is evo-devo — evolutionary developmental biology. Genes are organised in partially modular control cascades, so a change in a gene far up in a casca...

It is neither desirable nor possible to eliminate normative concerns from the psychology of reasoning. Norms define the most fundamental psychological questions: What are people trying to do, and how? Even if no one system of reasoning can be the norm, pure descriptivism is as undesirable and unobtainable in the psychology of reasoning as elsewhere...

We argue that reasoning has been conceptualized so narrowly in what is known as 'psychology of reasoning' that reasoning's relevance to cognitive science has become well-nigh invisible. Reasoning is identified with determining whether a conclusion follows validly from given premises, where 'valid' is taken to mean 'valid according to classical logi...

A “model” of a text is a mapping of its constants, predicates and relations onto a set of individuals. Stenning (1975, 1978) observed that powerful conventions for the interpretation of expository text ensure that texts determine models. Two contrasting theoretical interpretations of these and other observations are current in the literature. John...

People with autism spectrum condition (ASC) perform well on Raven’s matrices, a test which loads highly on the general factor in intelligence. However, the mechanisms supporting enhanced performance on the test are poorly understood. Evidence is accumulating that milder variants of the ASC phenotype are present in typically developing individuals,...

Oaksford & Chater (O&C) advocate Bayesian probability as a way to deal formally with the pervasive nonmonotonicity of common sense reasoning. We show that some forms of nonmonotonicity cannot be treated by Bayesian methods.

A new proposal for integrating the employment of formal and empirical methods in the study of human reasoning. In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen—a cognitive scientist and a logician—argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were o...

A View with no Room Is the psychology of deduction about the few well-known laboratory tasks in which subjects are presented with logical puzzles and asked to solve them: the selection task, syllogisms, the suppression task, conditional reasoning, …? And if our capacity of deduction is not just for performing these tasks, what is it for? What every...

A new proposal for integrating the employment of formal and empirical methods in the study of human reasoning.

Executive function has become an important concept in explanations of psychiatric disorders, but we currently lack comprehensive models of normal executive function and of its malfunctions. Here we illustrate how defeasible logical analysis can aid progress in this area. We illustrate using autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)...

Keith Stenning read philosophy and psychology at Oxford University and wrote his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Professor George Miller at Rockefeller University on discourse semantics as a foundation for discourse memory. He has researched memory, reasoning, communication, and learning, always concerned to integrate logical and psychological contribut...

Computational theories of mind assume that participants interpret information and then reason from those interpretations. Research on interpretation in deductive reasoning has claimed to show that subjects' interpretation of single syllogistic premises in an "immediate inference" task is radically different from their interpretation of pairs of the...

Conceptual learning in mathematics and science involves learning to coordinate multiple representation systems into smoothly functioning heterogeneous reasoning systems composed of sub-languages, graphics, mathematical representations, etc. In these heterogeneous systems information can be transformed from one representation to another by inference...

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a non...

IntroductionGeneralising Strategies across Reasoning TasksATIS in Teaching ReasoningStrategy Change and Representational LandscapesConclusion AcknowledgementsReferences

Modern logic provides accounts of both interpretation and derivation which work together to provide abstract frameworks for modelling the sensitivity of human reasoning to task, context and content. Cognitive theories have underplayed the importance of interpretative processes. We illustrate, using Wason's [Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 20 (1968) 273] select...

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an in- terpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of inter- preting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a...

this technical sense? However, if this is the intended claim, it faces two problems. The first is the argument presented here that mental models do contain inherently syntactic elements. The second is that the substantial individual differences between subjects in their facility at learning from direct and indirect representations at least casts so...

Wason's (1968) selection task was designed as a test of subjects' hypothesis testing behaviour, and Wason's early analysis of the difficulties subjects have with the task are closely related to Popper's philosophy of science. Popper's account of science is one of a progressive approach to a true theory through the sequential falsification of hypoth...

this paper, there is no guarantee that instructional or task changes will have the desired clarificatory effects. Nevertheless, to the extent they do, the experiments provide evidence that a problem was significant in the classical task. We return in the discussion to the issue of interpreting the effects of this task change

1. Introduction 2. Language, diagram and system 3. Hyperproof: industrial strength logic teaching 4. Euler and the syllogism: back to the age of reason 5. Why do we have to learn logic? A paradox resolved 6. Interpretation, reasoning, and communication 7. Cards and dice: assessing evidence and understanding experimenters 8. The proof of a power sta...

We advance a theoretical framework which combines recent insights of research in logic, psychology, and formal semantics, on the nature of diagrammatic representation and reasoning. In particular, we wish to explain the varied efficacy of reasoning and representing with diagrams. In general we consider diagrammatic representations to be restricted...

Curriculum design in recent years reflects the growing belief in the importance of developing thinking skills. In this paper, we focus on a particular theoretical approach to the study and teaching of thinking: cognitive science. We first give a very brief review of the recent research on critical thinking. We then concentrate on what cognitive sci...

Understanding how students learn to model is a multidisciplinary activity. It can be argued that those working in different disciplines such as physics, maths, economics and history may generate different views of the process of modeling. These views, in turn, have implications for how learning to model is understood, and how this might be supporte...

We review the various explanations that have been offered toaccount for subjects'' behaviour in Wason''s famous selection task. Weargue that one element that is lacking is a good understanding ofsubjects'' semantics for the key expressions involved, and anunderstanding of how this semantics is affected by the demands the taskputs upon the subject''...

Psychometric measures of ability are unsuited to computational descriptions of tasks, primarily because they cannot take process into account. Studies of aptitude--treatment interactions have often failed to replicate from task to task precisely because of this difficulty. The current study aligns psychometric measures with process accounts in the...

Subjects exhibiting logical competence choices, for example, in Wason's selection task, are exhibiting an important skill. We take issue with the idea that this skill is individualistic and must be selected for at some different level than System 1 skills. Our case redraws System 1/2 boundaries, and reconsiders the relationship of competence model...

Jon Barwise was unique amongst logicians in leading engagement between logic and other disciplines, notably linguistics, computer science, and the several disciplines concerned with diagrams. My main contact with Jon was through working on cognitive analyses of the learning processes of students being taught logic using Hyperproof, the heterogeneou...

Jon Barwise was unique amongst logicians in leading engagement between logic and other disciplines, notably linguistics, computer science, and the several disciplines concerned with diagrams. My main contact with Jon was through working on cognitive analyses of the learning processes of students being taught logic using Hyperproof, the heterogeneou...

A number of criteria for discriminating diagrammatic from sentential systems of representation by their manner of semantic interpretation have been proposed. Often some sort of spatial homomorphism between diagram and its referent is said to distinguish diagrammatic from sentential systems (e.g. Barwise & Etchemendy 1990). Or the distinction is ana...

Spatial Cognition brings together psychology, computer science, linguistics and geography, discussing how people think about space (our internal cognitive maps and spatial perception) and how we communicate about space, for instance giving route directions or using spatial metaphors. The technological applications adding dynamism to the area includ...

This paper describes a semantic approach to understanding the cognitive consequences for educational communication of assigning the same information to different modalities. The central idea is to base a theory of usability on semantic analysis of representational systems, and in particular the consequences of semantics for the computational comple...

This paper reviews our investigations of the processes involved in students' learning of elementary logic. This topic is of obvious practical relevance to those engaged in teaching logic, and some of our observations are of direct relevance to those practical concerns. But the process of learning logic is also of considerable theoretical significan...

Computer-based logic proofs are a form of “unnatural” language in which the process and structure of proof generation can be observed in considerable detail. We have been studying how students respond to multimodal logic teaching, and performance measures have already indicated that students’ pre-existing cognitive styles have a significant impact...

The Vicarious Learner project is investigating the role of dialogue in learning and, more specifically, how learners benefit from opportunities to 'overhear' other learners. We describe evidence of such learning by students using "vicarious learning resources" in a computer-supported learning environment. We argue that education dialogue has proper...

Logic, Language and Computation, volume 2 Lawrence S. Moss, Jonathan Ginzburg, and Maarten de Rijke The fields of logic, linguistics and computer science are intimately related, and modern research has uncovered a wide range of connections. This collection focuses on work that is based on the unifying concept of information. This collection of ni...

Theories of diagrams and diagrammatic reasoning typically seek to account for either the formal semantics of diagrams, or for the advantages which diagrammatic representations hold for the reasoner over other forms of representation. Regrettably, almost no theory exists which accounts for both of these issues together, nor how they affect one anoth...

Introduction This experiment arose from the confluence of two interests, one in "vicarious" learning (learning by observing others learning) (see e.g. McKendree, Stenning, Mayes, Lee, & Cox, 1998), and the other in the learning of elementary logic (see e.g. Stenning, Cox, & Oberlander, 1995; Stenning & Yule, 1997; Monaghan & Stenning, 1998). The ex...

Individual differences in the abilities and preferences of students have an influence on their responses to information presented in alternative ways. Explanations may appeal to differences in representation or in strategy. This paper reports an experiment that compares the response of students to two compu-tationally similar methods of teaching sy...

The Vicarious Learner project is investigating the roleof dialogue in learning and, more specifically, how learners benefit fromopportunities to 'overhear' other learners. A direct challenge to thisconcept comes from a study by Schober and Clark which claims that only direct participants can learneffectively from dialogue. We dispute this claim bot...

Abstract The Vicarious Learner project is investigating the fundamental role of dialogue for learning. More specifically, the project is exploring the benefits to learners of being able to observe others participating in discussion. Such opportunities are becoming fewer with the proliferation of computer-based courses and distance learning, as well...

Modern logic is an abstract study of consequence rather than a mechanistic study of reasoning. This abstract view has much to offer psychological studies of the representations which implement human reasoning. This paper reviews recent results showing the abstract equivalence of all the main psychological competence models of syllogistic reasoning....

Computer-based logic proofs are a form of `unnatural' language discourse, but the structure and process of proof generation can be observed in considerable detail, and analysis is leading to a number of general insights. We have been studying how students respond to multimodal logic teaching. Performance measures have already indicated that student...

Existing accounts of syllogistic reasoning oppose rule-based and model-based methods. Stenning and Oberlander (1995) show that the latter are isomorphic to well-known graphical methods, when these are correctly interpreted. We here extend these results by showing that equivalent sentential implementations exist, thus revealing that all these theori...

A recurrent theme in studying the interaction between human and formalism is the understanding of how people interact with representations in reasoning and communication. In contrast to the best known theories, which approach the question of the impact of representation upon reasoning through explanations in terms of human computational architectur...

This report examines the implementation of Statistical Process Control (SPC) in a sample of six UK companies. Practices, problems, and training procedures are identified and compared in order to assess training needs. Recommendations are made for effective SPC training and a prototype training package is described. Introduction More and more UK com...

this paper is to illustrate how at least the disparate techniques of semantic analysis and experimental psychology are implicated into the development of a general theory.

A cognitive theory of modality allocation has to explain the different cognitive consequences of assigning the same information to different modalities of expression---crudely, which picture is worth which thousand words? Most theories of the benefits of graphical representations have focussed on visual properties of graphics. This talk will sketch...

The world of employment is making ever increasing demands on reasoning and communication skills. Current curricular responses to these demands are scattered across many school subjects, separating the formal side of representational skills from their social embedding in problem solving and communication. Cognitive science has developed deep semanti...

The goal of a cognitive theory of modality assignment is to give a general account of the cognitive effects of assigning information to different modalities. This is an ambitious goal, some might say too ambitious, but without some general framework, the multi-disciplinary effort which will undoubtedly be necessary for progress is likely to remain...

A structured connectionist model using temporal synchrony has been proposed by Shastri & Ajjanagadde. This model has provided a mechanism which encodes rules and facts involving n-ary predicates and handles some types of dynamic variable binding. Their model, however, has problems in dealing with important knowledge representation issues such as bi...

At the intersection between symbolic inference and connectionism, there is interest in producing systems constructed from connectionist components which perform types of inference comparable to symbolic systems. The attraction of such systems is that, under restricted conditions, they may be capable of very fast, "reactive" responses to external st...

Examines training needs associated with statistical process control (SPC), focusing on changes in organizational structure resulting from the implementation of SPC and associated changes in the knowledge and skills demanded of employees. Preliminary data indicate that SPC creates a change in organizational levels such that responsibility for contro...

This paper reviews our investigations of the processes involved in students' learning of elementary logic. This topic is of obvious practical relevance to those engaged in teaching logic, and some of our observations are of direct relevance to those practical concerns. But the process of learning logic is also of considerable theoretical significan...

"Which picture is worth which 1000 words?" The best known theories approach this question through explanations in terms of human computational architecture. So, for Larkin & Simon [7], diagrams are efficacious because they allow the parallel computational power of human vision to be brought to bear on diagrammatic representations (at least in some...