Spatial belief revision

Abstract

Belief revision is the process of changing one's beliefs when a newly acquired fact contradicts the existing belief set. Psychological research on belief revision mostly used conditional reasoning problems in which an inconsistency arises between a fact, contradicting a valid conclusion, and the conditional and categorical premises. In this paper, we present a new experimental paradigm in which we explore how people change their mind about the location of objects in space. The participants received statements that described the spatial relations between a set of objects. From these premises they drew a conclusion which then, in the next step, was contradicted by a new, irrefutable fact. The participants’ task was to decide which of the objects to relocate and which one to leave at its initial position. We hypothesised that this spatial revision process is based on mental models and is affected by the functional asymmetry between reference objects (RO) and the located objects (LO) of spatial relations. The results from two experiments corroborate this hypothesis. We found that individuals have a strong preference to relocate the LO of the premises, but avoid relocating the RO. This is a novel finding and opens up new avenues of research on how humans mentally revise their beliefs about spatial relations between entities in the world.