Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Few experiments have examined how people reason aboutdurative relations, e.g., "during". Such relations posechallenges to present theories of reasoning, but manyresearchers argue that people simulate a mental timeline whenthey think about sequences of events. A recent theory positsthat to mentally simulate durative relations, reasoners do notrepresent all of the time points across which an event mightendure. Instead, they construct discrete tokens that stand inplace of the beginnings and endings of those events. The theorypredicts that when reasoners need to build multiple simulationsto solve a reasoning problem, they should be more prone toerror. To test the theory, an experiment provided participantswith sets of premises describing durative relations; theyassessed whether the sets were consistent or inconsistent. Theresults of the experiment validated the theory's prediction. Weconclude by situating the study in recent work on temporalthinking.