We examine schoolchildren’s reasoning with spatial relations, such as ‘is to the left of’. Our aims are to obtain a more precise account of the effect of working memory on reasoning, a more detailed understanding of the internal representation of mental models and a developmental perspective. We discuss two experiments in which 348 children, between eight and twelve years old, needed to verify conclusions for 24 reasoning problems describing the spatial relations between pieces of clothing. In both experiments, children in the experimental condition were allowed to take notes by means of paper and pencil. In both experiments we find that the participants spontaneously draw iconic representations of the items’ spatial ordering, have a strong preference for only considering one possible state of affairs even when more are relevant, and that an explanation in terms of working memory capacity alone cannot fully explain the data.

Researchers typically have a fair amount of freedom when it comes to data processing and analysis selection. In many instances, there isn't one correct way to, for example, deal with outliers, which gives rise to a multitude of reasonable analysis pathways, each with its own outcome. Computational advances provide researchers with a unique opportunity to view the impact of such researcher degrees of freedom on the results from a study. Multiverse analyses involve the computational analysis of all these potential pathways, which can demonstrate the robustness of a particular phenomenon, or the lack thereof. However, even though multiverse analyses are less susceptible to biases compared to the typical single-pathway approach, it is still possible to selectively add or omit pathways. To address this, we propose a more principled approach to conducting multiverse analyses, and illustrate how it can be applied using the Semantic Priming Across Many Languages project.

Two studies examined how lexical information contained in words affects people’s category representations. Some words are lexically suggestive regarding the taxonomic position of their referent (e.g., bumblebee, starfish). However, this information differs from language to language (e.g., in Dutch the equivalent words hold no taxonomic information: hommel, vlinder). Three language groups, Dutch, English, and Indonesian speakers, were tested in similarity and typicality judgment tasks. The results show that the lexical information affects only the users of the language (e.g., Dutch speakers rated Dutch-informative items, both in similarity and typicality tasks, higher than English and Indonesian speakers). Results are discussed in light of theories of concept representation and the language relativity hypothesis.