One the one hand, I am interested in the relation between concepts and explanations. Concepts are the basic components of thought. In their relation to properties and other concepts they contain a large amount of information that people employ with ease in their explanatory reasoning. What kind of relations are relevant to explanations? How do people use the information captured in their concepts to generate explanations? How do they judge the adequacy of an explanation? What makes a good explanation?
On the other hand, I am interested in how our conceptual knowledge influences the way we make inductive generalisations. How do people use the information captured in concepts and categories to make inductive judgments? What role does the typicality of the evidence play? How do we integrate positive and negative evidence?
Past projects:
How do people explain the enduring characteristics of everyday objects?
What affects the focus in explanations of comparative facts?
Do people represent functions of natural kinds as unique?
Can similarity based models of induction handle negative evidence?
Can negative evidence raise argument strength?
Current projects:
How does our long term semantic memory influence short term recall?
How do we integrate positive and negative evidence in property induction?
Which similarity measures best capture inductive strength?
What is the role of individual differences in essentialistic responding.
How can negative evidence increase argument strength?
Selected Conference presentations and Publications:
Hampton, J.A. & Heussen D. (2011) Intonation Stress and the Disambiguation of Noun-Noun Compounds. Under review.
Heussen, D., Voorspoels, W., & Storms, G. (2011). A mechanism to increase argument strength with negative evidence. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. ). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Aldrovandi, S., Poirier, M., Kusev, P., Heussen, D., & Ayton, P. (2011). Now I like it, now I don't: Delay effects and retrospective judgment. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. ). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Heussen, D., Voorspoels, W., Verheyen, S., Storms, G., & Hampton, J.A. (2011). Raising argument strength using negative evidence: A constraint on models of induction. (In press).
Heussen, D., Poirier, M., Hampton, J.A., & Aldrovandi, S. (2011). An effect of semantic memory on immediate memory in the visual domain. In B. Kokinov, A. Karmiloff-Smith, and N. J. Nersessian (Eds.). European Perspectives on Cognitive Science: Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Science. Sofia: NBU Press.
Heussen, D. & Hampton, J. A. (2010). Induction with mixed evidence: The role of typicality. Under Review.
Voorspoels, W., Verheyen, S., Janssen, M., Ameel, E., Heussen, D., De Deyne, S., Dry, M. J., Van Camp, T., Delvaux, F., & Storms, G. Is any beer just a beer? Applying spatial representations to similarity judgments by laymen in blind beer tasting. Under review.
Verheyen, S., Heussen, D. & Storms, G. (2010). On domain differences in categorization and context variety. (In press).
Heussen, D. (2010). When Functions and Causes compete. Thinking & Reasoning, 16, 233-250. LINK
Heussen, D., Voorspoels, W. & Storms, G. (2010). Can similarity-based models of induction handle negative evidence. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2033-2038). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. LINK
Heussen, D. (2009). Emeralds are expensive because they are rare: An empirical study of the way we explain the characteristics of everyday objects. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Publishing. LINK
Heussen, D., Aldrovandi, S., Kusev, P., & Hampton, J. A. (2009). Explanations of comparative facts: A shift in focus. In N. Taatgen, H. van Rijn, L. Schomaker, & J. Nerbonne (Eds.) Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1716-1721). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Aldrovandi, S., Poiri, M., Heussen, D., & Ayton, P. (2009). Memory strategies mediate the relationships between memory and judgment. In N. Taatgen, H. van Rijn, L. Schomaker, & J. Nerbonne (Eds.) Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2457-2462). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Hampton, J. A., Storms, G., Simmons, C. L., & Heussen, D. (2009). Feature Integration in Natural Language Concepts. Memory & Cognition, 37, 1150-1163. LINK
Heussen, D., Belardi, S., & Kusev, P. (2008). Loss aversion in contrastive explanations. Poster presented at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Chicago, Illinois.
Heussen, D. (2008). Property Explanation: When one property explains another. Unpublished PhD Thesis, City University, London, United Kingdom.
Heussen, D. & Hampton, J. A. (2008). Ways of explaining properties. In V. Sloutsky, B. Love, & K. McRae (Eds.) Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 143-148). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Heussen, D. & Hampton, J. A. (2007). Property Explanations: Causes vs. Functions. Poster presented at the Joint Meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society and Psychonomic Society. Edinburgh, UK. (Supported by the Grindley Grant)
Heussen, D. & Hampton, J. A. (2007). Emeralds are expensive because they are rare: Plausibility of property explanations. In S. Vosniadou & D. Kayser (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd European Cogntive Science Conference (pp. 101-106). Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Heussen, D. & Hampton, J. A. (2006). The influence of conceptual coherence on the plausibility of property explanations. Poster presented at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Houston, Texas.
Heussen, D. & Hampton, J. A. (2006). Plausibility of property explanations. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Belfast, Northern Ireland.