Markus Knauff: Space to Reason—A Spatial Theory of Human Thought

Markus Knauff’s book entitled Space to Reason: A Spatial Theory of Human Thought reports the results of a 15-year research program dedicated to the psychological investigation of what is known in the literature as relational reasoning. The book, however, does more than reporting previous research, for it develops a new psychological theory—called the Space to Reason Theory—which provides theoretical foundations and puts in perspective a substantial body of results obtained from behavioral experiments, brain-imaging studies, and computational modelling. Space to Reason is the first book to appear which offers an exhaustive treatment of the psychology of relational reasoning. Relational reasoning refers to inferences in which premisses and conclusions are propositions expressing relations between objects. The following inference is a typical example of a relational inference: