Conditional reasoning, causality, and the structure of semantic memory: strength of association as a predictive factor for content effects

Available evidence indicates that responses to conditional inferences using concrete causal premises is affected by the relative number of available alternate causes (Cummins, D.D., 1995. Memory and Cognition 23 (5), 646-658). We propose that another important factor that may influence the kinds of inferences made to causal conditionals is the relative strength of association between such causes and the consequent term. We present a study with adult participants that examines the effect of strength of association on performance on a conditional reasoning task using causal premises for which there exist one highly associated potential cause for the given consequent term. We predicted that adults would produce a greater proportion of biconditional responses to invalid forms with strongly associated premises than weakly associated ones, while valid forms would not be affected by strength of association. The results are consistent with this hypothesis.     

Reasoning counterfactually: Making inferences about things that didn't happen.

The authors investigated the relationship between reasoners' understanding of subjunctive conditionals (e.g., if p had happened, then q would have happened) and the inferences they were prepared to endorse. Reasoners who made a counterfactual interpretation of subjunctive statements (i.e., they judged the statement to imply that p and q did not happen) endorsed different inferences than those who did not. Those who made a counterfactual interpretation were more likely to (a)judge the situation in which p and q occurred to be inconsistent with the conditional statement and (b) make negative inferences such as modus tollens (i.e., – q therefore – p ). These findings occurred with familiar and unfamiliar content, affirmative and negative conditionals, and conditional and biconditional relations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Promise is Debt, Threat Another Matter: The Effect of Credibility on the Interpretation of Conditional Promises and Threats.

Evidence from reasoning tasks shows that promises and threats both tend to receive biconditional interpretations. They also both display high speaker control. On the face of it, the only difference seems to be the positive or negative signing of the consequent. In a promise, the speaker tries to persuade the hearer to do something by holding out the prospect of a particular reward; in a threat, the speaker tries to refrain the hearer from doing something by holding out the prospect of a particular punishment. This paper investigates the respects in which conditional promises and threats differ further by means of an inference task. The credibility of the consequent was manipulated in order to examine whether the acceptability ratings of inferences based on promises and on threats would be equally affected. The results of the inference task and an analysis of the reasons people give for their answers suggest that the credibility of promises is less affected by the use of excessive consequents than the credibility of threats. In other words, promise remains debt, whereas threat is another matter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theories of Conditional Reasoning: A Developmental Examination of Competing Hypotheses.

Children and adolescents were presented with problems that contained deontic (i.e., if action p is taken, then precondition q must be met) or causal (i.e., if event p occurs, then event q will transpire) conditionals and that varied in the ease with which alternative antecedents could be activated. Results showed that inferences were linked to the availability of alternative antecedents and the generation of "disabling" conditions (claims that the conditionals were false under specific circumstances). Age-related developments were found only on problems involving indeterminate inferences. Correlations among inferences differed for children and adolescents. The findings provide stronger support for domain-general theories than for domain-specific theories of reasoning and suggest, under some conditions, age-related changes in the roles of implicit and explicit processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditionals: A theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference.

The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Representations as mediators of adolescent deductive reasoning

In Experiment 1, preadolescents, middle adolescents, and late adolescents were presented 3 deductive reasoning tasks. With some important exceptions, conditional reasoning improved with age on problems containing permission conditional relations, and reasoning fallacies increased with age on problems containing causal conditional relations. The results of Experiments 2a and 2b indicated that problem type (i.e., permission or causal) does not mediate the activation of conditional reasoning skills. Rather, valid conditional inferences are more common on problems for which plausible alternative antecedents can be generated than on problems for which alternative antecedent generation is difficult. Conditional rules for which alternative antecedent generation is difficult may be misrepresented as biconditionals, resulting in biconditional rather than conditional reasoning.     

How people interpret conditionals: Shifts toward the conditional event.

We investigated how people interpret conditionals and how stable their interpretation is over a long series of trials. Participants were shown the colored patterns on each side of a 6-sided die and were asked how sure they were that a conditional holds of the side landing upward when the die is randomly thrown. Participants were presented with 71 trials consisting of all combinations of binary dimensions of shape (e.g., circles and squares) and color (e.g., blue and red) painted onto the sides of each die. In 2 experiments (N? = 66, N? = 65), the conditional event was the dominant interpretation, followed by conjunction, and material conditional responses were negligible. In both experiments, the percentage of participants giving a conditional event response increased from around 40% at the beginning of the task to nearly 80% at the end, with most participants shifting from a conjunction interpretation. The shift was moderated by the order of shape and color in each conditional's antecedent and consequent: Participants were more likely to shift if the antecedent referred to a color. In Experiment 2 we collected response times: Conditional event interpretations took longer to process than conjunction interpretations (mean difference = 500 ms). We discuss implications of our results for mental models theory and probabilistic theories of reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing less and knowing more: The benefits of perceptual ignorance.

We suggest that dispositions are more automatically inferred from nonlinguistic than from linguistic behavior, and thus the attributional processing of linguistic behavior is more easily impaired by peripheral cognitive activities. In Exp 1, Ss observed an applicant who claimed to possess the requisite attributes for a desirable job, but who failed to display nonlinguistic behavior to support that claim. Ss who performed a concurrent visual detection task based their attributions primarily on the applicant's nonlinguistic behavior and drew less biased inferences than did control Ss. In Exps 2 and 3, Ss heard an unenthusiastic essayist who was constrained to read a political speech. Ss who performed either a concurrent visual detection task or a concurrent social influence task drew less biased inferences than did controls. These studies suggest that person perception includes subprocesses that differ in their characteristic degrees of automaticity and that performing simultaneous cognitive operations may enable perceivers to avoid certain kinds of inferential errors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biomechanical analysis of masticatory system configuration in Neandertals and Inuits

Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991) present a theory of conditional inference based upon the manipulation of mental models. In the present paper, the theory is critically examined with regard to its ability to account for psychological data, principally with respect to the rate at which people draw the four basic inferences of modus ponens (MP), denial of the antecedent (DA), affirmation of the consequent (AC) and modus tollens (MT). It is argued first that the theory is unclear in its definition and in particular with regard to predictions of problem difficulty. Clarification and specification of principles are consequently provided here. Next, it is argued that there are a number of phenomena in the conditional reasoning literature for which the theory cannot account in its present form. Specifically, (a) the relatively frequency of DA and AC inferences on affirmative conditional is not as predicted by the theory, (b) differences occur between inferences on if then and only if rules beyond the capacity of the theory to explain and (c) there is no account of the "negative conclusion bias" observed when negated components are introduced into the rules. A number of revisions to the mental model theory of conditional reasoning are proposed in order to account for these findings.     

Conversational comprehension processes are responsible for reasoning fallacies in children as well as adults: If is not the biconditional.

Proposes that children do poorly on reasoning from premises of the form if p then q not because they construe if as a biconditional but rather because they use discourse comprehension processes that lead them to accept the invited inferences if not p then not q and if q then p. This hypothesis predicts that children should respond appropriately to premises in which the invited inferences are countermanded. In Exp I, 24 undergraduates and 44 10-yr-olds were given conditional reasoning problems. Some of these had a major premise consisting of a single if–then sentence, while others had a more elaborate major premise in which the invited inferences were explicitly countermanded. In Exp II, Ss were 24 undergraduates, 20 10-yr-olds, and 34 7-yr-olds. In some problems the major premise consisted of a single if–then statement; in others, the major premise consisted of 3 such statements, 2 of which shared the same consequent, thus implicitly countermanding the invited inferences. In both experiments, all age groups committed the fallacies in the simple condition but not in the more complex condition. It is concluded that children's representation of if distinguishes necessary from merely invited inferences. Data suggest a collection of countermandable context-dependent inferences of varying degrees of invitingness associated with if. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Propositional reasoning by model?

Two theories of propositional deductive reasoning are considered: the mental models of P. N. Johnson-Laird et al (see PA, 79:41765) and the mental logic of M. D. Braine (1994). The model theory is said to account for practically all of the known phenomena of deductive propositional reasoning, offer a general theory of conditionals, account for the most important aspects of Braine's theory, and predict new phenomena that rule theories cannot explain. It is argued that (1) the model theory is flawed in a way that is difficult to overcome, (2) conditionals are seriously misrepresented, (3) the algorithms proposed to implement it either allow invalid inferences or are psychologically useless, (4) Braine's theory accounts for all of the new phenomena worth considering, and (5) the model theory can predict Braine's results only at the cost of self-refutation. It is concluded that the mental model theory of propositional reasoning offers no reason to reject the program of mental logic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The dispositional inference strikes back: Situational focus and dispositional suppression in causal attribution.

The authors propose that correction of dispositional inferences involves the examination of situational constraints and the suppression of dispositional inferences. They hypothesized that suppression would result in dispositional rebound. In Study 1, participants saw a video of either a free or a forced speaker. Participants shown a forced speaker later made stronger dispositional inferences about a 2nd, free speaker than control participants did. Study 2 provided evidence for higher rebound among participants who reported trying harder to suppress dispositional inferences during the 1st video. In Study 3, participants were asked to focus on situational constraints or to avoid thinking about the speaker's characteristics. Only the latter instructions led to a dispositional rebound. These data support the view that the correction of dispositional inferences involves 2 processes that lead to distinct consequences in subsequent attribution work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditional reasoning in autism: Activation and integration of knowledge and belief.

Everyday conditional reasoning is typically influenced by prior knowledge and belief in the form of specific exceptions known as counterexamples. This study explored whether adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; N = 26) were less influenced by background knowledge than typically developing adolescents (N = 38) when engaged in conditional reasoning. Participants were presented with pretested valid and invalid conditional inferences with varying available counterexamples. The group with ASD showed significantly less influence of prior knowledge on valid inferences (p = .01) and invalid inferences (p = .01) compared with the typical group. In a secondary probability judgment task, no significant group differences were found in probabilistic judgments of the believability of the premises. Further experiments found that results could not be explained by differences between the groups in the ability to generate counterexamples or any tendency among adolescents with ASD to exhibit a “yes” response pattern. It was concluded that adolescents with ASD tend not to spontaneously contextualize presented material when engaged in everyday reasoning. These findings are discussed with reference to weak central coherence theory and the conditional reasoning literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing of logically valid and logically invalid conditional inferences in discourse comprehension.

Two competing theories of processing of conditionals (if-then) were tested. Syntactic theories posit that people only draw inferences conforming to the logically valid modus ponens (MP) schema. Mental models theories predict that people draw MP and invalid affirming-the-consequent (AC) inferences. Three experiments tested these predictions. Participants read short stories that conformed to either the MP or AC form but without conclusions, and they completed either priming or recognition tasks. Results indicate that both MP and AC inferences occur during discourse processing: MP and AC premise forms prime their respective conclusions, participants erroneously judged that they had read the conclusions to MP and AC arguments, and AC inferences did not stem from a biconditional interpretation of conditionals. Findings support mental models theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hypothetical and certain inferences from conditional arguments read in texts.

In 3 experiments, affirmative and hypothetical probes were presented after narrative texts containing conditional arguments. According to the data, readers represented modus ponens deductions as certain, except when it was only a weakly necessary cause of a given effect. They represented any logically invalid inferences resulting from affirming the conditional consequent as hypothetical, except when it was the effect of strongly sufficient cause. Accordingly, readers must be processing conditional syntax as an asymmetric constraint. However, the underlying causal knowledge can be sufficient either to discredit or warrant the inferences. Thus according to the theory of natural logic, readers can draw formal deductions and be convinced of their necessity. This provides further evidence that readers can represent their inferences as hypothetical (N. Campion, 2004). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Content and Strategy in Syllogistic Reasoning.

Syllogistic reasoning has been investigated as a general deductive process (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; Revlis, 1975; Rips, 1994). However, several studies have demonstrated the role of cognitive strategies in this type of reasoning. These strategies focus on the method used by the participants (Ford, 1995; Gilhooly, Logie, Wetherick, & Wynn, 1993) and strategies related to different interpretations of the quantified premises (Roberts, Newstead, & Griggs, 2001). In this paper, we propose that content (as well as individual cognitive differences) is an important factor in inducing a certain strategy or method for syllogistic resolution. Specifically, we suggest that syllogisms with a causal conditional premise that can be extended by an agency premise induce the use of a conditional method. To demonstrate this, we carried out two experiments. Experiment 1 provided evidence that this type of syllogism leads participants to draw the predicted conditional conclusions, in contrast with control content syllogisms. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that the drawing of conditional conclusions is based on a causal conditional to an agent representation of the syllogism premises. These results support the role of content as inducing a particular strategy for syllogistic resolution. The implications of these results are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of reasoning with causal conditionals.

A total of 512 children in Grades 1 through 6 received a conditional inference task using causal conditionals (If cause P, then effect Q) and a generation of alternatives task. The inference task used premises for which there were few or many possible alternative causes. Results show a steady age-related increase in uncertainty responses to the two uncertain logical forms, affirmation of consequent (AC) and denial of antecedent (DA), and an increase in production of disabling conditions for modus ponens. More uncertainty responses were produced to AC and DA with premises with many possible alternatives. Individual differences in inference production were related to numbers of alternatives produced in the generation task. Results support the idea that both developmental and individual differences in reasoning can be at least partially explained by differential access to knowledge stored in long-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditional reasoning: The necessary and sufficient conditions.

Five experiments, with 163 university students, investigated 2 theories of conditional reasoning (CDR). The pragmatic schema theory posits that CDR is mediated by context-sensitive inference rules. According to the contextual cuing theory, inferences are based on a mental model that represents necessity and sufficiency relations. Both schematic relations and necessity relations predicted responses on a 4-card selection task. In contrast, after the effects of perceived necessity had been partialled out, schematic relations did not predict responses to either a conditional arguments task or a task in which Ss judged the similarity of "if then" and "only if" statements. Findings question the assumption that reasoning is mediated by schematic rules, which presumably apply regardless of task. A reconceptualization of the pragmatic reasoning schema is proposed. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reasoning With Premises That Are Not Empirically True: Evidence for the Role of Inhibition and Retrieval.

Two studies examined conditional reasoning with false premises. In Study 1, 12- and 16-year-old adolescents made "if-then" inferences after producing an alternative antecedent for the major premise. Older participants made more errors on the simple modus ponens inference than did younger ones. Reasoning with a false premise reduced this effect. Study 2 examined the relation between performance on a negative priming task (S. P. Tipper, 1985) and reasoning with contrary-to-fact premises in 9- and 11-year-olds. Overall, there was a correlation between the relative effect of negative priming on reaction times and the number of knowledge-based responses to the reasoning problems. The results of these studies are consistent with the idea that reasoning with premises that are not true requires an interaction between information retrieval and inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)