To mark the award of the Broadbent prize to Ruth Byrne by the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Ruth will present her recent keynote Broadbent lecture at ESCOP2025 in the School seminar series.
This lecture considers the central role of the imagination in cognition, illustrated by examples from different domains of thinking. Experimental evidence on moral decision making demonstrates the impact of imagination, with implications for the development of understanding other people’s perspectives. Evidence on causal reasoning shows the role of imagination in how people construct explanations, with consequences for understanding artificial intelligence decisions. The cognitive processes that underlie the mental simulation of possibilities depend on iconic models, as indicated by experiments on counterfactual inferences. The evidence supports the argument that the engine of the mind is the imagination.