Cognitive Modeling (SS 2021)
Organizer: Marco Ragni
Assisstants: Daniel Brand, Hannah Dames, Sara Todorovikj
Conditionals are statements describing a causal relationship between two propositions. Given the current state of one of them (also called a minor premise), a conclusion about the other one can be deduced. Consider the following example:
If he has measles, then he has a fever. (Conditional)
He has measles. (Minor Premise)
Given this information, you can now make a conclusion what, if anything, follows. Almost all people would infer that "he has a fever". This inference form is called Modus Ponens and is one of four forms that conditional reasoning research focuses on.
Over the years, a vast amount of cognitive theories for conditional reasoning have been proposed on different bases: formal logic, mental models, suppositions, dual-processes with suppositions, and probabilities. Most theories aim to conclude whether a certain inference form is accepted or not. However, present day research and experiments concentrate on endorsements -- in the example above, instead of a reasoner concluding whether "he has a fever" or not, they determine how likely is it that "he has a fever" by giving a probabilistic endorsement in the range 0-100. We are interested in examining whether and how cognitive theories can be adapted to model such endorsements, which will be one of the goals of the present seminar.
The seminar is a block seminar. The seminar will be organized online.
Background Literature (use VPN and get access through your University Freiburg account):
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Byrne, R. and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (2009): ‘If’ and the problems of conditional reasoning, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 13, Issue 7, pp. 282-287, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2009.04.003
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Ragni, M., Dames, H., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2019). A meta-analysis of conditional reasoning. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (pp. 151-156). https://modeltheory.org/papers/2019meta-conditionals.pdf
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Oberauer, K. (2006). Reasoning with conditionals: A test of formal models of four theories. Cognitive Psychology, 53(3), 238-283. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010028506000235?casa_token=UFK-Vtef8UQAAAAA:yUqE7FHioSvnFW7II7h0OSXUxzCQ6GDGA4kfpUqFpsQl2nYLyai0DR6w0_pJSLB3wxB8q_S0oQ
Schedule:
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Organizational meeting (via Zoom) Friday, April 23rd at 12:00
(please mail your name and interest in participation no later than APRIL 22nd to the organizer) -
Midterm presentation (via Zoom) Friday, June 11th from 12:00-14:00
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Seminar presentation (Zoom) July 9th from 9-17 and July 10th from 9-17
Requirements
- Presentation of your preliminary & final results
- Theoretical and computational foundation
- Predictive performance
- Ideas for improvement
- Written report of your work (~6 pages, CogSci format)
- Introduction/Motivation
- Theoretical Foundation
- Method/Model
- Results
- Conclusion/Discussion
Materials
- Introduction Meeting [presentation]