Research Overview
In Thinking Lab, we study thinking or higher-level reasoning, such as causal learning, concepts, judgments, and inferences. We study not only basic research but also applied issues. Below are the four specific themes of research that our lab currently focuses. Please click to learn more details.
People have lots of causal knowledge, and they never cease to ask why questions. Why ask why? How does our causal knowledge influence our thinking? In our previous studies, we looked at how causal knowledge determines what aspects of concepts become more important. For instance, curvedness is essential for boomerangs but less important for bananas. We showed that this is because curvedness...
Mental illnesses are increasingly described as disorders of the brain, caused by biological factors, such as chemical imbalances or genes. While such portrayals can reduce the extent to which mentally ill people are blamed for their condition, biomedical accounts of mental illness can be associated with pessimism about prognoses (Lebowitz, Ahn, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2013) as well as a greater...
How do we learn causal relations? Of course, we acquire causal knowledge through external sources (e.g., teachers, Wikipedia, books). But we also infer causal relations by observing the relationship between events. What limits do people have in such situations and what biases do people exhibit during causal learning? In our lab, we have found that people are more affected by observations made...
Mind-Body Dualism Mainstream science tells us that all mental activities stem from brain activities. This apparently implies that people have no free will, because brain activities, which are physical events, cannot occur on their own and must have been determined by other physical events. What would be the consequences of denying free will? Why do US courts see a rise in defendants...