Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, e.g., thedescription ‘two different meetings happened at the same time’could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, orit could mean that the meetings both started and endedsimultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentallysimulate events with durations by representing the starts andends of events along a chronological axis (Khemlani et al.,2015). To draw conclusions from this durational mental model,reasoners consciously scan it in the direction of earlier timepoints to later time points. The account predicts that peopleshould prefer descriptions that are congruent with achronological scanning procedure, e.g., descriptions thatmention the starts of events before the ends of events. Twoexperiments corroborate the prediction, and show thatchronological biases in temporal reasoning manifest in caseswhen reasoners consciously evaluate the durations of events.