Humans can generate reasonable answers to novel queries (Schulz, 2012): if I asked you what kind of food you want to eat for lunch, you would respond with a food, not a time. The thought that one would respond "After 4pm" to "What would you like to eat" is either a joke or a mistake, and seriously entertaining it as a lunch option would likely never happen in the first place. While understanding how people come up with new ideas, thoughts, explanations, and hypotheses that obey the basic constraints of a novel search space is of central importance to cognitive science, there is no agreed-on formal model for this kind of reasoning. We propose that a core component of any such reasoning system is a type theory: a formal imposition of structure on the kinds of computations an agent can perform, and how they're performed. We motivate this proposal with three empirical observations: adaptive constraints on learning and inference (i.e. generating reasonable hypotheses), how people draw distinctions between improbability and impossibility, and people's ability to reason about things at varying levels of abstraction.

该研究提出类型理论是理解人类如何进行新颖问题思考、解释和猜测的核心组成部分，并以三个实证性观察来证明这一观点：学习和推论的自适应性限制、人们在不可能性和不太可能性之间区分的能力以及人类在不同层次的抽象概念上进行推理的能力。

类型理论在人类学习和推理中的应用