Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We propose that probabilistic inference is supported by a men-tal toolbox that includes sampling and symmetry-based rea-soning in addition to several other methods. To flesh out thisclaim we consider a spatial reasoning task and describe a num-ber of different methods for solving the task. Several recentprocess-level accounts of probabilistic inference have focusedon sampling, but we present an experiment that suggests thatsampling alone does not adequately capture people’s infer-ences about our task.