Ruth Byrne gave a talk on the mental representations of counterfactual conditionals at the EPS Science of Regret meeting organised by Sarah Beck, Aidan Feeney and Teresa McCormack at the University of Birmingham Feb 12-13th 2016. Other speakers included Neal Roese (Northwestern University), Georgio Coricelli (University of Southern California), Marcel Zeelenberg (Tilberg University), and Graham Loomes (Warwick University).
Sabrina Haimovici, Raluca Briazu and Ruth Byrne will participate in the EPS Science of Regret meeting in Birmingham University Feb 12th and 13th 2016.
Aidan Feeney, Queen’s University Belfast, will give a lab talk ‘Between reasoning and semantic cognition: A hybrid account of category-based induction?’ on Tuesday December 1st 2015.
The Instituto Cervantes held the Irish Spanish Latin American literary festival on October 2nd-4th 2015. It included a discussion panel on ‘Remembering and Forgetting’ which included the Argentinian author Carlos Gamerro and the Chilean author Andrea Jeftanovic as well as Ruth Byrne, moderated by Jennifer Wood.
Members of the lab gave talks at the London Reasoning Workshop in Birkbeck University on 6th and 7th August 2015:
Celia Rasga, Cristina Quelhas, and Ruth Byrne
Autistic children’s reasoning: counterfactual and false-belief inferences about reasons for actions
Marta Couto, Cristina Quelhas, & Ruth Byrne
Counterexamples in reasoning about advice conditionals: Tips and Warnings
Members of the lab will give presentations at the European Society for Cognitive Psychology’s 19th conference in Cyprus in September:
1. Mary Parkinson and Ruth Byrne
‘Counterfactual and semifactual alternatives in moral judgments about failed attempts to harm’
2. Shane Timmons and Ruth Byrne
‘Cognitive depletion and moral reasoning’
3. Tiago Almeida and Ruth Byrne
‘Counterfactual reasoning and moral elevation’
The Association for Psychological Science held its annual conference in New York on May 21st-24th. Research by members of the group featured in two symposia:
CONDITIONAL REASONING
Chair: Ruth Byrne
1. Ruth Byrne, Orlando Espino
Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Ireland
University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
‘Conditionals and embodied representations’
2. Henry Markovits, Janie Brisson, Pier-Luc de Chantal.
University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada
‘Deductive updating is not Bayesian’
3. Ray Nickerson
Tufts University, US
‘Probabilistic conditional reasoning’
4.Geoff Goodwin, Phil Johnson-Laird.
University of Pennsylvania, US
New York University, US
‘The truth of conditional assertions’
COUNTERFACTUAL ‘IF ONLY’ THOUGHTS
Chair: Ruth Byrne
1. Denis Hilton, Christophe Schmeltzer.
University of Toulouse, France
‘A question of detail: Matching counterfactuals to actual cause in pre-emption scenarios’
2. Ruth Byrne, Eoin Gubbins, Tiago Almeida
Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Ireland
‘Counterfactual if only thoughts in moral elevation and emulation intentions’
3. Kai Epstude, Kai Jonas.
University of Groningen, Netherlands
‘Testing the effects of counterfactual thoughts in health behavior’
The European Observatory for the New Human Condition held its second executive forum in Copenhagen on 27th and 28th April at the Danish Academy for the Sciences and Letters, attended by Ruth Byrne. For more information on the initiative, see the Humanities for the Environment and Environmental Humanities at Trinity College Dublin.
Ruth Byrne gave two talks in Imola and Bologna, Italy on March 16th and March 17th 2015:
1. ‘The Rational Imagination’
5.45pm Thursday 16th April 2015
BIM Biblioteca Comunale di Imola, Imola
2. ‘Counterfactual Thoughts: Reasoning and Imagination’
11am Friday 17th April 2015
Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, Bologna
Reasoning and Imagination Lab 