Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People’s reasoning about physical and social explanations iswell understood (Keil, 2008). However, less is known abouthow people reason about mathematical explanations (Johnsonet. al., 2017). Experiment 1 replicates the central result ofJohnson et. al (2017), that people impose order on simplearithmetic explanations, as well as sets the limits of thatpreference. Experiment 2 extends the results of a second factor,the character of the relationship between the operations relatedby the explanation.