Iconicity bias and duration.

Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, for example, the description "one meeting happened during another" could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, or it could mean that the meetings started and ended simultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentally simulate descriptions of durational events by representing their starts and ends along a spatial axis, that is, an iconic representation of time. To draw conclusions from this iconic mental model, reasoners consciously scan it in the direction of earlier to later timepoints.

Temporal explanations.

People can explain phenomena by appealing to temporal relations, for example, you might explain a colleague's absence at a meeting by inferring that their prior meeting ended late. Previous explanatory reasoning research shows that people construct causal explanations to resolve causal conflicts. Accordingly, temporal explanations may help reasoners resolve temporal conflicts, and we describe four experimental tests of the hypothesis ( = 240).

Reasoning about Durations.

A set of assertions is consistent provided they can all be true at the same time. Naive individuals could prove consistency using the formal rules of a logical calculus, but it calls for them to fail to prove the negation of one assertion from the remainder in the set. An alternative procedure is for them to use an intuitive system (System 1) to construct a mental model of all the assertions.

Recognition memory for hue: Prototypical bias and the role of labeling.

How does the concurrent use of language affect perception and memory for exemplars? Labels cue more general category information than a specific exemplar. Applying labels can affect the resulting memory for an exemplar. Here 3 alternative hypotheses are proposed for the role of labeling an exemplar at encoding: (a) labels distort memory toward the label prototype, (b) labels guide the level of specificity needed in the current context, and (c) labels direct attention to the label's referent among all possible features within a visual scene.