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People who have no experience with programming can create informal programs to rearrange the order of cars in trains. To find out whether they rely on kinematic mental simulations, the current studies examined participants' eye movements in two experiments in which participants performed various moves and rearrangements on a railway consisting of a main track running from left to right and a siding entered from and exited to the left track. In Experiment 1, they had to imagine different sorts of single moves of cars on the railway. The sequences of their fixations resembled iconic gestures: they tended to look at the starting location of the imagined move, and then at its final location. In Experiment 2, the task was to create descriptions of how to solve four sorts of rearrangements that differ in their Kolmogorov complexity. It predicted the time to find the correct solution and the relative number and duration of fixations recorded during the description of each move for rearrangements of different complexity. Participants were more likely to fixate on the symbols on the cars than anything else, and they fixated longer when the rearrangement was more difficult. They also tended to fixate regions of the tracks where a car's movement began or ended, as if they were imagining a car moving along the tracks. The results suggest that humans rely on a kinematic mental simulation when creating informal algorithms.

An assertion about a fact can in principle be tested in observations. That is impossible for assertions about what is permissible or obligatory, i.e., deontic assertions based on moral principles, conventions, rules, or laws. Many modal logics concern these matters. But an integrated theory of emotions and reasoning predicts that emotional reactions and strength of belief should be correlated for deontic assertions, but not for factual assertions. You can be convinced that it is wrong to take paperclips from the office, and that it is right for society to provide health care for everyone, and your emotional response to these two assertions is likely to correlate with the strength of your beliefs in them. In contrast, you can be convinced both that fresh snow is white and that fossil fuels are making the world hotter, but have an emotional reaction to only the second of these assertions. Grounds for factual assertions are empirical findings. But assessments of deontic assertions depend in part on the emotions that they elicit. Previous studies have corroborated this prediction for moral claims, matters of convention, prudential rules, and personal recommendations. We report two experiments that yield the same interaction for legal pronouncements from the Italian Civil Code compared with parallel factual assertions. People like propositions they believe, and they believe propositions they like. We discuss several remaining unknowns including the potential role of emotions in reasoning about legal and other deontic propositions.

Following the assumptions of the mental model theory and its account of moral judgements, we argue for a main role of reasoning in moral judgements, especially in dealing with moral conflicts. In four experiments, we invited adult participants to evaluate scenarios describing moral or immoral actions. Our results confirm the predictions deriving from our assumptions: Given a moral or immoral scenario, the manipulation of the propositions which refer to norms and values results in a scenario eliciting a moral conflict (Experiment 1); when invited to create conflict versions from no-conflict versions of moral or immoral scenarios, individuals manipulate the propositions in the scenario which describe norms and values rather than emotional factors (Experiment 2); the evaluation of conflict scenarios takes longer than the evaluation of no-conflict scenarios (Experiment 3), and this is because conflict scenarios involve more deliberative reasoning (Experiment 4). We discuss our results in relation to competing theories of moral judgements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unifies the main types of deductive reasoning into a single set of basic procedures. Consolidation of the microtheories developed from a mental models perspective in a single theory; Validation of a theory through a computational model which allows predictions of the performance of the subjects in different reasoning domains; Testing of the performance of the model against the performance of experimental subjects in the three areas of reasoning.