Informal Reasoning: Theory and Method.

Presents an overview of this special issue and provides some implications for theory and conclusions. The great majority of the everyday reasoning, including that of expert groups engaged in their professions, is informal. By contrast, most of the studies of human inference reported by psychologists in the literature are of formal reasoning. This discrepancy provides considerable cause for concern and not only because cognitive psychology should have some practical application. Excessive focus on formal reasoning tasks has also, in our view, inhibited the development of good theories of human reasoning. What Is Informal Reasoning, and Why Do We Need to Study It? Psychological studies of formal reasoning have fallen largely into two domains: deductive reasoning and statistical inference. These two endeavours have much in common and some researchers work in both areas. In both cases, participants are presented with what problem-solving researchers call well-defined problems. A well-defined problem can be solved by use of the information provided and no other; in fact, the correct solution to these problems often requires the reasoner to use only the information provided in the premises, and to avoid adding background information and knowledge to the problem domain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relational Integration, Inhibition, and Analogical Reasoning in Older Adults.

The difficulty of reasoning tasks depends on their relational complexity, which increases with the number of relations that must be considered simultaneously to make an inference, and on the number of irrelevant items that must be inhibited. The authors examined the ability of younger and older adults to integrate multiple relations and inhibit irrelevant stimuli. Young adults performed well at all but the highest level of relational complexity, whereas older adults performed poorly even at a medium level of relational complexity, especially when irrelevant information was presented. Simulations based on a neurocomputational model of analogical reasoning, Learning and Inference with Schemas and Analogies (LISA), suggest that the observed decline in reasoning performance may be explained by a decline in attention and inhibitory functions in older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual Differences in the Inference of Word Meanings From Context: The Influence of Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary Knowledge, and Memory Capacity.

Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was related to performance, but short-term memory span and memory for the literal content of the text were not. Children with poor reading comprehension were not impaired in learning novel vocabulary taught through direct instruction, but children with both weak reading comprehension and vocabulary were. Implications for the relation between vocabulary development and text comprehension are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)