To be rational is to be able to reason. Thirty years ago psychologists believed that human
reasoning depended on formal rules of inference akin to those of a logical calculus. This …

This article reviews research on the use of situation models in language comprehension and
memory retrieval over the past 15 years. Situation models are integrated mental …

In this book, Walter Kintsch presents a theory of human text comprehension and extends his
analysis to related areas. Comprehension is conceptualized as a two-stage process: first …

Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when
we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world …

Graphics have been used since ancient times to portray things that are inherently
spatiovisual, like maps and building plans. More recently, graphics have been used to …

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object
recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from …

The metaphor of a" cognitive map" has attracted wide interest since it was first proposed in
the late 1940s. Researchers from fields as diverse as psychology, geography, and urban …

Long studied by anthropologists, historians, and linguists, oral traditions have provided a
wealth of fascinating insights into unique cultural customs that span the history of …

Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They
have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them …

Once signed languages are recognized as natural human languages, a world of exploration
opens up. Signed languages provide a powerful tool for investigating the nature of human …