| Citation | Distinguished for his contributions to cognitive psychology, especially the psychology of reasoning and of language. His early work showed that people make systematic errors in reasoning and that the word order and content of the premises has a large effect on the form of their conclusions - a result in conflict with the view that they employ formal rules of inference. He developed the idea that the lexical meanings of words could be treated as computational procedures, executed in the process of understanding discourse - an idea that led to series of experiments on how people draw conclusions from syllogistic premises and reason about spatial relations described in language. The results of these and later experiments strongly support the conjecture that linguistic comprehension consists in the construction of mental models, and reasoning in the manipulation of these models. |