Relations between inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning.

One of the most important open questions in reasoning research is how inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning are related. In an effort to address this question, we applied methods and concepts from memory research. We used 2 experiments to examine the effects of logical validity and premise–conclusion similarity on evaluation of arguments. Experiment 1 showed 2 dissociations: For a common set of arguments, deduction judgments were more affected by validity, and induction judgments were more affected by similarity. Moreover, Experiment 2 showed that fast deduction judgments were like induction judgments—in terms of being more influenced by similarity and less influenced by validity, compared with slow deduction judgments. These novel results pose challenges for a 1-process account of reasoning and are interpreted in terms of a 2-process account of reasoning, which was implemented as a multidimensional signal detection model and applied to receiver operating characteristic data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgment dissociation theory: An analysis of differences in causal, counterfactual and covariational reasoning.

Research suggests that causal judgment is influenced primarily by counterfactual or covariational reasoning. In contrast, the author of this article develops judgment dissociation theory (JDT), which predicts that these types of reasoning differ in function and can lead to divergent judgments. The actuality principle proposes that causal selections focus on antecedents that are sufficient to generate the actual outcome. The substitution principle proposes that ad hoc categorization plays a key role in counterfactual and covariational reasoning such that counterfactual selections focus on antecedents that would have been sufficient to prevent the outcome or something like it and covariational selections focus on antecedents that yield the largest increase in the probability of the outcome or something like it. The findings of 4 experiments support JDT but not the competing counterfactual and covariational accounts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Asymmetries in predictive and diagnostic reasoning.

In this article, we address the apparent discrepancy between causal Bayes net theories of cognition, which posit that judgments of uncertainty are generated from causal beliefs in a way that respects the norms of probability, and evidence that probability judgments based on causal beliefs are systematically in error. One purported source of bias is the ease of reasoning forward from cause to effect (predictive reasoning) versus backward from effect to cause (diagnostic reasoning). Using causal Bayes nets, we developed a normative formulation of how predictive and diagnostic probability judgments should vary with the strength of alternative causes, causal power, and prior probability. This model was tested through two experiments that elicited predictive and diagnostic judgments as well as judgments of the causal parameters for a variety of scenarios that were designed to differ in strength of alternatives. Model predictions fit the diagnostic judgments closely, but predictive judgments displayed systematic neglect of alternative causes, yielding a relatively poor fit. Three additional experiments provided more evidence of the neglect of alternative causes in predictive reasoning and ruled out pragmatic explanations. We conclude that people use causal structure to generate probability judgments in a sophisticated but not entirely veridical way. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgments of learning reflect encoding fluency: Conclusive evidence for the ease-of-processing hypothesis.

According to the ease-of-processing hypothesis, judgments of learning (JOLs) rely on the ease with which items are committed to memory during encoding—that is, encoding fluency. Conclusive evidence for this hypothesis does not yet exist because encoding fluency and item difficulty have been confounded in all previous studies. To disentangle the effects of encoding fluency and item difficulty on JOLs, we used a variant of the learner–observer–judge method in which participants observed the study phase of another participant and indicated his or her JOLs. At the same time, the to-be-studied word pairs were concealed by strings of symbols. Our experiment revealed that participants use self-paced study time as a cue for JOLs when they themselves have studied and recalled word pairs before. This metacognitive monitoring of study time provides strong support for the ease-of-processing hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integrating outcome research and clinical reasoning in psychotherapy planning.

This article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of outcome research and clinical reasoning as bases of treatment planning and presents a synthesis in which these two types of information complement each other. The author proposes that therapy planning should begin with a review of the relevant outcome literature and also that divergence from research-based guidelines might be warranted under several conditions, including (a) when the client is demographically or culturally dissimilar to the study samples, (b) when assessment suggests a mismatch between the etiologies of the client's disturbance and the processes addressed by empirically supported treatments, and (c) when use of such treatments is followed by a lack of progress that signals the advisability of midcourse correction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

New perspectives on autobiographical memory: The integration of narrative processing and autobiographical reasoning.

Researchers from diverse psychological subdisciplines have increasingly turned their attention to the storied aspect of human thought. Narrative processing and autobiographical reasoning are 2 forms of this conscious thought. Narrative processing is the tendency to create thought units that use vivid imagery, sequential plots, characters, and salient goals. Autobiographical reasoning consists of interpreting and evaluating remembered experiences. Both forms of thought are discussed in D. P. McAdams's (see record 2001-06545-002) personality theory and D. B. Pillemer's (see record 2001-06545-003) cognitive research. S. Bluck and T. Habermas (see record 2001-06545-004) highlight developmental aspects of narrative processing and autobiographical reasoning, particularly in adolescent identity formation. U. M. Staudinger (see record 2001-06545-005) illustrates how autobiographical reasoning about memories and life stories serves as a springboard for wisdom at different stages of the life cycle. Implications for integrating subdisciplines of psychology are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Spacing One's Study: Evidence for a Metacognitive Control Strategy.

This article investigated individual control of spacing strategies during study. Three predictions were outlined: The spacing hypothesis suggests that people choose to space their study to improve long-term learning via the spacing effect. The massing hypothesis suggests that people choose to mass their study because of illusions of confidence during study. The metacognitive hypothesis suggests that people control their spacing schedules as a function of their metacognitive judgments of specific to-be-learned items. To test these hypotheses, the authors asked participants to study and make judgments of learning for cue-target pairs. Then, participants were given three choices; they could study the pair again immediately (massed), study the pair again after the entire list had been presented (spaced), or choose not to restudy (done). Results supported a metacognitively controlled spacing strategy-people spaced items that were judged to be relatively easy but massed items that were judged as relatively difficult. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The architecture of intuition: Fluency and affect determine intuitive judgments of semantic and visual coherence and judgments of grammaticality in artificial grammar learning.

People can intuitively detect whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or does not have one (incoherent) before and independently of actually retrieving the common associate. The authors argue that semantic coherence increases the processing fluency for coherent triads and that this increased fluency triggers a brief and subtle positive affect, which is the experiential basis of these intuitions. In a series of 11 experiments with 3 different fluency manipulations (figure-ground contrast, repeated exposure, and subliminal visual priming) and 3 different affect inductions (short-timed facial feedback, subliminal facial priming, and affect-laden word triads), high fluency and positive affect independently and additively increased the probability that triads would be judged as coherent, irrespective of actual coherence. The authors could equalize and even reverse coherence judgments (i.e., incoherent triads were judged to be coherent more frequently than were coherent triads). When explicitly instructed, participants were unable to correct their judgments for the influence of affect, although they were aware of the manipulation. The impact of fluency and affect was also generalized to intuitions of visual coherence and intuitions of grammaticality in an artificial grammar learning paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of proportional reasoning: Where young children go wrong.

Previous studies have found that children have difficulty solving proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units until 10 to 12 years of age, but can solve parallel problems involving continuous quantities by 6 years of age. The present studies examine where children go wrong in processing proportions that involve discrete quantities. A computerized proportional equivalence choice task was administered to kindergartners through 4th-graders in Study 1, and to 1st- and 3rd-graders in Study 2. Both studies involved 4 between-subjects conditions that were formed by pairing continuous and discrete target proportions with continuous and discrete choice alternatives. In Study 1, target and choice alternatives were presented simultaneously; in Study 2, target and choice alternatives were presented sequentially. In both studies, children performed significantly worse when both the target and choice alternatives were represented with discrete quantities than when either or both of the proportions involved continuous quantities. Taken together, these findings indicate that children go astray on proportional reasoning problems involving discrete units only when a numerical match is possible, suggesting that their difficulty is due to an overextension of numerical equivalence concepts to proportional equivalence problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

False fame prevented: Avoiding fluency effects without judgmental correction.

Three studies show a way to prevent fluency effects independently of judgmental correction strategies by identifying and procedurally blocking the sources of fluency variations, which are assumed to be embodied in nature. For verbal stimuli, covert pronunciations are assumed to be the crucial source of fluency gains. As a consequence, blocking such pronunciation simulations through a secondary oral motor task decreased the false-fame effect for repeatedly presented names of actors (Experiment 1) as well as prevented increases in trust due to repetition for brand names and names of shares in the stock market (Experiment 2). Extending this evidence beyond repeated exposure, we demonstrated that blocking oral motor simulations also prevented fluency effects of word pronunciation on judgments of hazardousness (Experiment 3). Concerning the realm of judgment correction, this procedural blocking of (biasing) associative processes is a decontamination method not considered before in the literature, because it is independent of exposure control, mood, motivation, and post hoc correction strategies. The present results also have implications for applied issues, such as advertising and investment decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metacognitive control and spaced practice: Clarifying what people do and why.

What do learners do when they control whether to engage in massed or spaced practice? According to theories by Son (2004) and by Metcalfe and Kornell (2005), the tendency for learners to choose spaced practice over massed practice should decline as item difficulty becomes greater. Support originally was obtained when pairs containing unfamiliar words were presented briefly for study, but subsequent research has suggested that, under these conditions, learners had difficulty initially encoding the members of the to-be-learned pairs. In Experiments 1 and 2, we failed to support the previously mentioned prediction in conditions in which the difficulty of learning was not correlated with the difficulty of initially encoding the pair members. Learners' relative preference for spaced practice increased, rather than decreased, with greater item difficulty, consistent with either a discrepancy-reduction-like account or an agenda-based-regulation account. In Experiment 3, we independently varied item difficulty and the point value that items were worth on the final test. Learners' relative preference for spaced practice was greater for high- than for low-value items but was unaffected by item difficulty. These results are more consistent with an agenda-based-regulation account than with a discrepancy-reduction account. More generally, learners' choices appear to be strategic and to reflect theory-based decisions, suggesting some level of appreciation for the relative benefits of massed versus spaced practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditional reasoning and conditionalization.

In solving conditional reasoning problems, reasoners are assumed to compute the probability of the conclusion, conditionalizing first on the categorical premise, giving the knowledge-based component, and conditionalizing then on the conditional-statement premise, from which the assumption-based component is derived. Because reasoners find it difficult to compute the second-step conditionalization except when the conditional-statement premise is found to be related to the result of the first-step conditionalization as for modus ponens or, possibly, for modus tollens, the knowledge-based component generally dominates reasoning performance. After representing all the possible cases in which conditional-argument forms may appear, this approach was found to be consistent with the results from the 3 experiments reported in this study, whereas 2 alternative hypotheses account for only some of the results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others'. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999, 2002) argued that unskilled performers in particular lack metacognitive insight about their relative performance and disproportionately account for better-than-average effects. The unskilled overestimate their actual percentile of performance, whereas skilled performers more accurately predict theirs. However, not all tasks show this bias. In a series of 12 tasks across 3 studies, the authors show that on moderately difficult tasks, best and worst performers differ very little in accuracy, and on more difficult tasks, best performers are less accurate than worst performers in their judgments. This pattern suggests that judges at all skill levels are subject to similar degrees of error. The authors propose that a noise-plus-bias model of judgment is sufficient to explain the relation between skill level and accuracy of judgments of relative standing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When less is not always more: Stereotype knowledge and reasoning development.

Developmental studies on heuristics and biases have reported controversial findings suggesting that children sometimes reason more logically than do adults. We addressed the controversy by testing the impact of children's knowledge of the heuristic stereotypes that are typically cued in these studies. Five-year-old preschoolers and 8-year-old children were tested with a card game version of the classic base-rate task. Problems were based on stereotypes that were familiar or unfamiliar for preschoolers. We also manipulated whether the cued stereotypical response was consistent (no-conflict problems) or inconsistent (conflict problems) with the correct analytic response that was cued in the problem. Results showed that an age-related performance decrease on the conflict problems was accompanied by an age-related performance increase on the no-conflict problems. These age effects were most pronounced for problems that adopted stereotypes that were unfamiliar for the 5-year-old preschoolers. When preschoolers were familiar with the stereotypes, their performance also started being affected. Findings support the claim that previously reported age-related performance decreases on classic reasoning tasks need to be attributed to the increased need to deal with tempting heuristics and not to a decrease in analytic thinking skills per se. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facilitating children's proportional reasoning: A model of reasoning processes and effects of intervention on strategy change.

In this study, 140 fourth graders were asked to solve proportion problems about juice-mixing situations both before and after an intervention that used a manipulative model or other materials in 3 experiments. Using a manipulative model based on children's prior knowledge about crowdedness and equal distribution was effective in letting children discover a unit strategy, which was useful for solving proportion problems. The model was more effective for those who had an appropriate representation but could not correctly compare juice concentrations than it was for those who didn't have the representation. On the basis of this study, different approaches appear to be necessary to facilitate children's proportional reasoning, depending on the reasoning process (representation or comparison) with which children are having difficulty. Interventions on the basis of the process model and learning that builds on intuitive knowledge are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Metacognitive awareness and prevention of relapse in depression: Empirical evidence.

Metacognitive awareness is a cognitive set in which negative thoughts/feelings are experienced as mental events, rather than as the self. The authors hypothesized that (1) reduced metacognitive awareness would be associated with vulnerability to depression and (2) cognitive therapy (CT) and mindfulness-based CT (MBCT) would reduce depressive relapse by increasing metacognitive awareness. They found (1) accessibility of metacognitive sets to depressive cues was less in a vulnerable group (residually depressed patients) than in nondepressed controls; (2) accessibility of metacognitive sets predicted relapse in residually depressed patients; (3) where CT reduced relapse in residually depressed patients, it increased accessibility of metacognitive sets; and (4) where MBCT reduced relapse in recovered depressed patients, it increased accessibility of metacognitive sets. CT and MBCT may reduce relapse by changing relationships to negative thoughts rather than by changing belief in thought content. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Linguistic Knowledge, Processing Speed, and Metacognitive Knowledge in First- and Second-Language Reading Comprehension: A Componential Analysis.

The authors report results of a study into the role of components of first-language (L1; Dutch) and second-language (L2; English) reading comprehension. Differences in the contributions of components of L1 and L2 reading comprehension are analyzed, in particular processing speed in L1 and L2. Findings indicate that regression weights of the L1 and L2 components are different. Although correlations between most processing speed components and reading comprehension are substantial, there are no unique contributions to the explanation of either L1 or L2 reading comprehension when linguistic and metacognitive knowledge are accounted for. In addition, L1 reading comprehension is shown to have a large contribution to L2 reading comprehension, supporting theories of L1-L2 transfer of reading skills. Results are discussed from a developmental perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Haidt's Moral Intuitionist Theory: A Psychological and Philosophical Critique.

Jon Haidt's (2001) proposal (see record 2001-18918-008) for a moral intutionist theory of morality is criticized on psychological and philosophical grounds, including (a) the apparent reduction of social influence to one kind, overt compliance, and the virtual ignoring of the role of persuasion in moral and other decision making; (b) the failure to distinguish development of a psychological entity from its deployment or functioning; and (c) the failure to consider, in distinguishing cause and reason as explanatory concepts, the motivating power of reasons. Arguments for an evolutionary approach to morality are also faulted on the grounds that they assume that adaptation is served by nonmoral rather than moral (fairness- and benevolence-based) criteria. Finally, the authors suggest that an intuitionist approach such as that of Haidt may obscure important aspects of moral decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Logic and human reasoning: An assessment of the deduction paradigm.

The study of deductive reasoning has been a major paradigm in psychology for approximately the past 40 years. Research has shown that people make many logical errors on such tasks and are strongly influenced by problem content and context. It is argued that this paradigm was developed in a context of logicist thinking that is now outmoded. Few reasoning researchers still believe that logic is an appropriate normative system for most human reasoning, let alone a model for describing the process of human reasoning, and many use the paradigm principally to study pragmatic and probabilistic processes. It is suggested that the methods used for studying reasoning be reviewed, especially the instructional context, which necessarily defines pragmatic influences as biases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)