Topic: reasoning

Experimental psychology research on attention, perception, learning, memory, language and reasoning falls within the society’s Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology remit. Supports small empirical projects in experimental psychology, including research assistance, participant costs, specialist software, scanning fees, essential small equipment and consumables. The maximum is GBP 10,000 for a project normally completed within one year. Applications are due 1 December 2026, with earliest start 1 February. Funds are reimbursed to the host institution in arrears; overheads, student fees and

Experimental psychology research on attention, perception, learning, memory, language and reasoning falls within the society’s Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology remit. Travel and accommodation support for a visit to another institution to learn experimental methods or undertake studies unavailable at the home department. Up to GBP 3,500 is available to the visitor, with up to GBP 100 of additional actual host costs. Subsistence, conference fees and poster costs are excluded. The next submission date is 1 December 2026; visits should start at least three months after submission. Appl

Yejin Choi examines how data diversity, synthetic examples, imitation learning and reinforcement learning can strengthen reasoning in small language models. The conversation discusses output homogeneity, Prismatic Synthesis, training models to reason before predicting tokens, and pluralistic alignment that represents a broader range of human values.

Aakanksha Chowdhery examines changes to pre-training that could support reasoning, planning and multi-step agent workflows. Drawing on large-model training experience, she discusses next-token prediction, attention and loss functions, trajectory data, context retrieval, error recovery and the role of scale in learning tool use.

Analogical reasoning –learning about new things by relating it to previous knowledge– lies at the heart of human intelligence and creativity and forms the core of educational practice. Children start creating and using analogies early on, making incredible progress moving from associative processes to successful analogical reasoning. For example, if we ask a four-year-old “Horse belongs to stable like chicken belongs to …?” they may use association and reply “egg”, whereas older children will likely give the intended relational response “chicken coop” (or other term to refer to a chicken’s hom

Extensive research on science teaching has shown the effectiveness of analogies as a didactic tool which, when appropriately and effectively used, facilitates the learning process of abstract concepts. This seminar does not contradict the efficacy of such a didactic use of analogies in this seminar but switches attention and interest on their heuristic use in approaching and understanding of what previously unknown. Such a use of analogies derives from research with 10 to 17 year-olds, who, when asked to make predictions in novel situations and to then provide explanations about these predicti

Relational thinking, or the process of identifying and integrating relations between mental representations, is regularly invoked during reasoning. This mental capacity enables us to draw higher-order abstractions and generalize across situations and contexts, and we have argued that it should be included in the pantheon of executive functions. In this talk, I will briefly review our lab's work characterizing the roles of lateral prefrontal and parietal regions in relational thinking. I will then discuss structural and functional predictors of individual differences and developmental chan

A key purpose of causal reasoning by individuals and by collectives is to enhance action, to give humans yet more control over their environment. As a result, causal reasoning serves as the infrastructure of both thought and discourse. Humans represent causal systems accurately in some ways, but also show some systematic biases (we tend to neglect causal pathways other than the one we are thinking about). Even when accurate, people’s understanding of causal systems tends to be superficial; we depend on our communities for most of our causal knowledge and reasoning. Nevertheless, we are better

The seminar will first outline the architecture of the human mind, specifying general and domain-specific mental processes. The place of causal reasoning and its relations with the other processes will be specified. Experimental, psychometric, developmental, and brain-based evidence will be summarized. The main message of the talk is that causal thought involves domain-specific core processes rooted in perception and served by special brain networks which capture interactions between objects. With development, causal reasoning is increasingly associated with a general abstraction system which

The integrated conflict monitoring theory of Botvinick introduced cognitive demand into conflict monitoring research. We investigated effects of individual differences of cognitive demand and another determinant of conflict monitoring entitled reinforcement sensitivity on conflict monitoring. We showed evidence of differential variability of conflict monitoring intensity using the electroencephalogram (EEG), functional magnet resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral data. Our data suggest that individual differences of anxiety and reasoning ability are differentially related to the recruitment

There has been a recent surge of interest in the question of whether and how deep learning algorithms might be capable of abstract reasoning, much of which has centered around datasets based on Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM), a visual analogy problem set commonly employed to assess fluid intelligence. This has led to the development of algorithms that are capable of solving RPM-like problems directly from pixel-level inputs. However, these algorithms require extensive direct training on analogy problems, and typically generalize poorly to novel problem types. This is in stark contrast to h

Analogies, broadly defined, map novel concepts onto familiar concepts, making them essential for perception, reasoning, and communication. We argue that analogy-building served a critical role in the evolution of cumulative culture, by allowing humans to learn and transmit complex behavioural sequences that would otherwise be too cognitively demanding or opaque to acquire. The emergence of a protolanguage consisting of simple labels would have provided early humans with the cognitive tools to build explicit analogies and to communicate them to others. This focus on analogy-building can shed ne

The work to be presented in this talk proposes a novel framework seamlessly providing key properties of both neural nets (learning) and symbolic logic (knowledge and reasoning). Every neuron has a meaning as a component of a formula in a weighted real-valued logic, yielding a highly interpretable disentangled representation. Inference is omnidirectional rather than focused on predefined target variables, and corresponds to logical reasoning, including classical first-order logic theorem proving as a special case. The model is end-to-end differentiable, and learning minimizes a novel loss funct

Abstract semantic relations (e.g., category membership, part-whole, antonymy, cause-effect) are central to human intelligence, underlying the distinctively human ability to reason by analogy. I will describe a computational project (Bayesian Analogy with Relational Transformations) that aims to extract explicit representations of abstract semantic relations from non-relational inputs automatically generated by machine learning. BART’s representations predict patterns of typicality and similarity for semantic relations, as well as similarity of neural signals triggered by semantic relations dur