November 6-8, 2015   |   Champaign, Illinois, USA

Organizer:
Andrei Cimpian University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign E-mail   |   Website	Special Issue Psychonomic Bulletin & Review The Process of Explanation Volume 24, Issue 5 (Oct. 2017) Guest Editors Andrei Cimpian New York University Frank Keil Yale University	The Process of Explanation: Digital Event September 2017 What is an explanation? How do people explain things? What is the underlying cognition of explanations? Anyone who has ever tried to explain anything to another person knows that those questions are far from trivial. How would you explain a car differential to someone? Or how your toilet flush works? This digital event focused on the psychology of explanations. The event was based on the recognition that explanations are crucial to our cognitive lives because they inform our understanding of the world, structure our concepts, and guide our actions. Read the Posts

Description
This Psychonomic Society Leading Edge Workshop will bring together a diverse group of scholars with the goal of advancing theory on the psychological mechanisms by which people generate explanations. Explanations are crucial to our cognitive lives because they supply understanding of the world, without which none of the technological and scientific achievements of our species would have been possible. Yet, despite the importance and ubiquity of explanations, contemporary cognitive science has relatively little to tell us about the processes that underlie these judgments: How do people actually come up with explanations? Answering this question is no small feat, however, since a complete specification of these processes requires expertise in multiple areas of cognition: memory search and retrieval, reasoning and problem-solving, causal cognition, cognitive development, and so on. Although the daunting number of cognitive “ingredients” that go into a successful explanation may make it difficult for any individual investigator to make progress on this issue, this complexity provides the perfect motivation for an intensive workshop such as this one. By pooling the expertise of researchers working on the various cognitive components relevant to explanation, this workshop is likely to break new theoretical ground and set the agenda for research on explanation in the years to come. Moreover, because fostering understanding is a core mission of education (especially now, with the recent introduction of the Common Core State Standards), the knowledge created via this workshop will have relevance beyond the scientific community, appealing to parents, teachers, and education policymakers.

Participants

Renée Baillargeon University of Illinois	Daniel Bartels University of Chicago	Jean- François Bonnefon CNRS, Toulouse	Susan Carey Harvard University	Andrei Cimpian University of Illinois
Gerald DeJong University of Illinois	Michael Dougherty University of Maryland	Susan Gelman University of Michigan	Reid Hastie University of Chicago	Thomas Hills University of Warwick
Frank Keil Yale University	David Landy Indiana University	Cristine Legare University of Texas at Austin	Tania Lombrozo University of California, Berkeley	Sandeep Prasada Hunter College, CUNY
Steven Sloman Brown University	Michael Strevens New York University	Eric Luis Uhlmann INSEAD Asia