The consistency of durative relations

Few experiments have examined how people reason about durative relations, e.g., "during". Such relations pose challenges to present theories of reasoning, but many researchers argue that people simulate a mental timeline when they think about sequences of events. A recent theory posits that to mentally simulate durative relations, reasoners do not represent all of the time points across which an event might endure. Instead, they construct discrete tokens that stand in place of the beginnings and endings of those events. The theory predicts that when reasoners need to build multiple simulations to solve a reasoning problem, they should be more prone to error. To test the theory, an experiment provided participants with sets of premises describing durative relations; they assessed whether the sets were consistent or inconsistent. The results of the experiment validated the theory's prediction. We conclude by situating the study in recent work on temporal thinking.

诸多研究尚未来得及探讨人们如何对延续性关系进行推理，例如‘在…期间’。此类关系对现有的推理理论构成了挑战，然而众多学者认为，人们在思考事件序列时，会在脑海中模拟一个心理时间线。近期一项理论提出，为了在心理上模拟延续性关系，推理者并非代表事件可能持续的所有时间点。相反，他们构建离散的标记来代表那些事件的起始与终结。该理论预测，当推理者需要构建多个模拟以解决推理问题时，他们更易犯错误。为了验证这一理论，实验向参与者提供了描述延续性关系的命题集合；他们评估了这些集合的一致性或矛盾性。实验结果验证了理论的预测。我们通过对时间思维领域最近的研究工作进行定位，对本项研究进行了总结。