Sangeet Khemlani
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View article: Vision language models have difficulty recognizing virtual objects
Vision language models have difficulty recognizing virtual objects Open
Vision language models (VLMs) are AI systems paired with both language and vision encoders to process multimodal input. They are capable of performing complex semantic tasks such as automatic captioning, but it remains an open question abo…
View article: Vision language models are unreliable at trivial spatial cognition
Vision language models are unreliable at trivial spatial cognition Open
Vision language models (VLMs) are designed to extract relevant visuospatial information from images. Some research suggests that VLMs can exhibit humanlike scene understanding, while other investigations reveal difficulties in their abilit…
View article: Naïve epistemics: A theory of rational and error-prone mental state reasoning
Naïve epistemics: A theory of rational and error-prone mental state reasoning Open
Effective communication depends on reasoning about what others know and believe, and failures in executive functioning can disrupt the way adults reason about mental states. No study has revealed errors traceable to mental state reasoning …
View article: Human verifications: Computable with truth values outside logic
Human verifications: Computable with truth values outside logic Open
Cognitive scientists treat verification as a computation in which descriptions that match the relevant situation are true, but otherwise false. The claim is controversial: The logician Gödel and the physicist Penrose have argued that human…
View article: Iconicity bias and duration
Iconicity bias and duration Open
Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, e.g., 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 simultaneou…
View article: Building a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive drivers of performance under pressure: An international multi-panel Delphi study
Building a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive drivers of performance under pressure: An international multi-panel Delphi study Open
Introduction The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport. Despite recognition that such performance depends on a range of cognitive fa…
View article: Mental models and the algorithms of deduction
Mental models and the algorithms of deduction Open
Pose the following problem to a smart eight-year-old: "All machines can break down. Alexa is a machine. What follows?" and the child is likely to reply: "Alexa can break down." So, as experiments confirm, human beings unschooled in logic a…
View article: Reasoning about want
Reasoning about want Open
No present theory explains the inferences people draw about the real world when reasoning about “bouletic” relations, i.e., predicates that express desires, such as 'want' in Lee wants to be in love. Linguistic accounts of 'want' define it…
View article: Human verifications: Computable with truth values outside logic
Human verifications: Computable with truth values outside logic Open
The theory of mental models allows modal truth values (‘possibly true and possibly false’) and counterfactual truth values (‘true but it could have been false’), which are outside standard logics. Naive individuals have the intuition that …
View article: Understanding Is a Process
Understanding Is a Process Open
How do we gauge understanding? Tests of understanding, such as Turing's imitation game, are numerous; yet, attempts to achieve a state of understanding are not satisfactory assessments. Intelligent agents designed to pass one test of under…
View article: Building a Transdisciplinary Expert Consensus on the Cognitive Drivers of Performance Under Pressure: An International Multi-panel Delphi Study
Building a Transdisciplinary Expert Consensus on the Cognitive Drivers of Performance Under Pressure: An International Multi-panel Delphi Study Open
The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport, and depends on a range of cognitive factors. How common these key performance factors are…
View article: Reasoning about properties: A computational theory.
Reasoning about properties: A computational theory. Open
We present a theory of how people reason about properties. Such inferences have been studied since Aristotle's invention of Western logic. But, no previous psychological theory gives an adequate account of them, and most theories do not go…
View article: The Power of Theory
The Power of Theory Open
No abstract available.
View article: Much Ado About Nothing: The Mental Representation of Omissive Relations
Much Ado About Nothing: The Mental Representation of Omissive Relations Open
When the absence of an event causes some outcome, it is an instance of omissive causation. For instance, not eating lunch may cause you to be hungry. Recent psychological proposals concur that the mind represents causal relations, includin…
View article: Desires can conflict with intentions; plans cannot
Desires can conflict with intentions; plans cannot Open
While many formal frameworks distinguish between desires and intentions, and considerable empirical work shows that people interpret them differently, no studies examine how people reason about them. We extend Harner and Khemlani’s (2020) …
View article: Preferences in the quantified description of visual groups
Preferences in the quantified description of visual groups Open
Research suggests that people minimize the amount of effort used to generate natural language descriptions of visual scenes. In the case of visual scenes with multiple groups, recent work has found that people tend to generate quantitative…
View article: Learning how to use the verb ‘want’: A corpus study
Learning how to use the verb ‘want’: A corpus study Open
Children’s production of mental state verbs is studied to research their theory of mind and general cognitive development. Desire verbs are a rich resource as children produce them frequently and early in development, with ‘want’ being of …
View article: Epistemic verbs produce spatial models
Epistemic verbs produce spatial models Open
Verbs such as ‘know’ and ‘think’ help people describe mental states, and reasoners without any training in logic can make epistemic inferences about mental states. For instance, verbs such as ‘know’ are factive, i.e., they describe true pr…
View article: Temporal explanations help resolve temporal conflicts
Temporal explanations help resolve temporal conflicts Open
People can explain phenomena by appealing to temporal relations, e.g., you might explain a colleague’s absence at a meeting by inferring that their prior meeting did not end on time. Cognitive scientists have yet to investigate temporal ex…
View article: Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments
Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments Open
People more frequently select norm‐violating factors, relative to norm‐conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal‐selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette‐based paradigms. We use a no…
View article: Much ado about nothing: The mental representation of omissive relations
Much ado about nothing: The mental representation of omissive relations Open
When the absence of an event causes some outcome, it is an instance of omissive causation. For instance, not eating lunch may cause you to be hungry. Recent psychological proposals concur that the mind represents causal relations, includin…
View article: Principled connections guide semantic feature production
Principled connections guide semantic feature production Open
When people think about the features of scissors, they often spontaneously recall a central feature of scissors: they they cut things. They tend not to recall other features of scissors, e.g., that they have handles. The present paper posi…
View article: Norms and the meaning of omissive enabling conditions
Norms and the meaning of omissive enabling conditions Open
People often reason about omissions. One line of research shows that people can distinguish between the semantics of omissive causes and omissive enabling conditions: for instance, not flunking out of college enabled you (but didn’t cause …
View article: Teleological generics
Teleological generics Open
Certain “generic” generalizations concern functions and purposes, e.g., cars are for driving. Some functional properties yield unacceptable teleological generics: for instance, cars are for parking seems false even though people park cars …