Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People can explain phenomena by appealing to temporal relations, e.g., you might explain a colleague’s absence at a meeting by inferring that their prior meeting did not end on time. Cognitive scientists have yet to investigate temporal explanations, and explanatory reasoning research tends to focus on how people assess causal explanations; it shows that reasoners often generate causal explanations to resolve conflicts. We posit that temporal explanations help reasoners resolve temporal conflicts, and describe three experiments that test the hypothesis. Experiment 1 provided participants with temporal information that was consistent or inconsistent and elicited their inferences about what followed. Participants spontaneously provided temporal explanations to resolve inconsistencies, and many of them also provided more conservative refutations. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants evaluated explanations and refutations in light of conflicting information. The studies showed that participants spontaneously generate temporal explanations, and in certain cases, they prefer temporal explanations when a more conservative refutation was available. The research is the first to examine patterns in temporal explanatory reasoning.