Priming in deduction: a spatial arrangement task

Reasoning and Reading in Adults. A New Reasoning Task for Detecting the Visual Impendance Effect

The visual impedance hypothesis states that at the time of reasoning, the reading context provokes visual images, which may add irrelevant details to an inference and thus could hamper reasoning. This study aims to create a new visual version of a reasoning task, similar to the traditional propositional task of relational syllogisms, but based on visuospatial components. Using such a task, it would be possible to investigate the deductive ability of relational inferences in tests without the need for reading. Two reasoning tasks were used and measures of working memory, visuospatial memory, intelligence, and reading comprehension were taken. The participants were 61 university students without reading difficulties. Results show that both versions of the reasoning task work similarly in finding the main reasoning effects expected. Findings support the visual impedance effect, that is, fewer correct responses in problems with imaginable contents than with neutral ones. They indicate that this new visual task could be used to explore reasoning skills without reading being involved, and this would be useful for testing reasoning in people both with and without reading difficulties.

Perceptual inferences about indeterminate arrangements of figures

Previous studies in spatial propositional reasoning showed that adults use a particular strategy for making representations and inferences from indeterminate descriptions (those consistent with different alternatives). They do not initially represent all the alternatives, but construct a unified mental representation that includes a kind of mental footnote. Only when the task requires access to alternatives is the unified representation re-inspected. The degree of generalisation of this proposal to other perceptual situations was evaluated in three experiments with children, adolescents and adults, using a perceptual inference task with diagrammatic premises that gave information about the location of one of three possible objects. Results obtained with this very quick perceptual task support the kind of representation proposed from propositional spatial reasoning studies. However, children and adults differed in accuracy, with the results gradually changing with age: indeterminacy leads adults to require extra time for understanding and inferring alternatives, whereas children commit errors. These results could help inform us of how people can make inferences from diagrammatic information and make wrong interpretations.

Encoding time and signs exposure time in the representation of diagrammatic deontic meanings

It has been proposed that prohibition and obligation be represented in different ways in reasoning with deontic information (Bucciarelli & Johnson-Laird, 2005). Obligations are salient in permissible situations and prohibitions in impermissible situations. In some specific cases, differential initial representations are also consistently predicted from the comprehension of negations, if prohibition is considered as the negation of an obligation. Three experiments evaluate whether traffic signs of prohibition and obligation speed up the response time to the proposed direction represented and whether this advantage remains when people have more time to think. When making judgements about the manoeuvre performed by a vehicle, participants' response times are consistent with the predicted representation when they have a short time (i.e., 300ms) to understand the premise. In this case they represent what is permissible by obligatory signs and also what is impermissible by prohibitory signs. However, if they have more time (i.e., 1000 ms) to understand the premise, they still represent what is permissible by obligatory signs but they seem to change their initial representations to what is permissible by prohibitory signs.

The interpretation of indicative and subjunctive concessives

Using a priming paradigm in the context of a reading comprehension task, the possibilities that people keep in mind in order to understand indicative and subjunctive concessive sentences were examined and compared to those from factual and counterfactual 'if A, not-B' conditionals. The length of time it took people to read conjunctive descriptions (i.e., A and B, A and not-B, not-A and B, not-A and not-B) after they had been primed by the different types of linguistic form was measured. The results suggest that, whereas indicative 'even though' concessives and 'if, not' conditionals are understood by keeping in mind just a single possibility ('A and B' and 'A and not-B', respectively), the initial representations of subjunctive 'even if' concessive-conditionals and 'if, not' counterfactuals are compatible with a multiple-model representation. The implications of these results are discussed within the mental models framework.