Item analyses of age relations on reasoning tests

Analyses at the level of individual items were conducted on 11 data sets representing various combinations of participant samples and tests of reasoning. The magnitude of the relations between age and solution accuracy did not vary systematically across a wide range of item difficulty, although there was some evidence for independent age-related influences on the more difficult items. The results were tentatively interpreted as reflecting the operation of at least 2 types of age-related effects on tests of reasoning, 1 common to all items and 1 sensitive to the greater processing demands associated with more difficult items.     

Affective facilitation and inhibition of cultural influences on reasoning

Research in South Korea and the United States examined how affective states facilitate or inhibit culturally dominant styles of reasoning. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, affective cues of mood influence judgements by serving as embodied information about the value of accessible inclinations and cognitions. Extending this line of research to culture, we hypothesised that positive affect should promote (and negative affect should inhibit) culturally normative reasoning. The results of two studies of causal reasoning supported this hypothesis. Positive and negative affect functioned like "go" and "stop" signals, respectively, for culturally typical reasoning styles. Thus, in happy (compared to sad) moods, Koreans engaged in more holistic reasoning, whereas Americans engaged in more analytic reasoning.     

Affective facilitation and inhibition of cultural influences on reasoning

Research in South Korea and the United States examined how affective states facilitate or inhibit culturally dominant styles of reasoning. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, affective cues of mood influence judgements by serving as embodied information about the value of accessible inclinations and cognitions. Extending this line of research to culture, we hypothesised that positive affect should promote (and negative affect should inhibit) culturally normative reasoning. The results of two studies of causal reasoning supported this hypothesis. Positive and negative affect functioned like “go” and “stop” signals, respectively, for culturally typical reasoning styles. Thus, in happy (compared to sad) moods, Koreans engaged in more holistic reasoning, whereas Americans engaged in more analytic reasoning.     

Memory factors in age-related differences in simple reasoning

Adults in their 50s were compared with adults in their late teens or 20s in the accuracy of relatively simple reasoning decisions involving varying amounts of information. Because the magnitude of the age differences in decision accuracy was independent of the amount of information relevant to the decision, it was suggested that adults in their 20s and 50s do not differ in the effectiveness of integrating information across multiple premises. However, the 2 groups differed in the accuracy of trials involving only a single relevant premise, and thus it was inferred that 1 factor contributing to reasoning differences within the age range from 20 to 60 may be a failure to encode, or retain, relevant information.     

Follower moral reasoning influences perceptions of transformational leadership behavior

Transformational leadership reflects charismatic, but ethical, influence on followers. However, leadership ultimately occurs through the perceptual and attribution processes within followers. Accordingly, the perception and evaluation of transformational leadership is likely to be influenced by followers' moral reasoning, which is the ability that allows individuals to identify and interpret ethically‐salient issues in social environments. As predicted by social‐cognitive principles of self‐schemas, observers' moral reasoning positively related to the perception and positive evaluation of transformational leadership behavior, but not to positive affective reactions towards that behavior. These same relationships did not occur for the perception and evaluation of transactional leadership behavior. Implications for whistle‐blowing behavior, organizational ethics, and the measurement of transformational leadership are discussed.     

Sources of age-related individual differences in block design tests

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the possibility that adult age differences on block design tasks originate at least in part because of a reduced efficiency with increased age in the cognitive processes associated with block manipulation. Young and older performed a computer-implemented block design task constructed in such a way that design segmentation and motor dexterity factors were minimized. The older adults, compared to the young adults, were substantially slower and less efficient (in terms of a lower frequency of selecting the optimum sequence of block manipulations to match the target pattern). It was concluded that important sources of age-related individual differences on block design tasks are the speed of carrying out relevant processes, and one's knowledge about the relationship of the patterns on the block's faces to one another.     

Feedback influences children's reasoning about math equivalence: A meta-analytic review

ABSTRACT

Decades of research have focused on children's reasoning about math equivalence problems for both practical and theoretical insights. Not only are math equivalence problems foundational in arithmetic and algebra, they also represent a class of problems on which children's thinking is resistant to change. Feedback is one instructional tool that can serve as a key trigger of cognitive change. In this paper, we review all experimental studies (N = 8) on the effects of feedback on children's (ages 6–11) understanding of math equivalence. Meta-analytic results indicate that feedback has positive effects for low-knowledge learners and negative effects for high-knowledge learners, and these effects are stronger for procedural outcomes than conceptual outcomes. Findings highlight the variable influences of feedback on math equivalence understanding and suggest that models of thinking and reasoning need to consider learner characteristics, learning outcomes, and learning materials, as well as the dynamic interactions among them.     

In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning

Researchers in thinking and reasoning have proposed recently that there are two distinct cognitive systems underlying reasoning. System 1 is old in evolutionary terms and shared with other animals: it comprises a set of autonomous subsystems that include both innate input modules and domain-specific knowledge acquired by a domain-general learning mechanism. System 2 is evolutionarily recent and distinctively human: it permits abstract reasoning and hypothetical thinking, but is constrained by working memory capacity and correlated with measures of general intelligence. These theories essentially posit two minds in one brain with a range of experimental psychological evidence showing that the two systems compete for control of our inferences and actions.     

Teaching Bayesian reasoning in less than two hours

The authors present and test a new method of teaching Bayesian reasoning, something about which previous teaching studies reported little success. Based on G. Gigerenzer and U. Hoffrage's (1995) ecological framework, the authors wrote a computerized tutorial program to train people to construct frequency representations (representation training) rather than to insert probabilities into Bayes's rule (rule training). Bayesian computations are simpler to perform with natural frequencies than with probabilities, and there are evolutionary reasons for assuming that cognitive algorithms have been developed to deal with natural frequencies. In 2 studies, the authors compared representation training with rule training; the criteria were an immediate learning effect, transfer to new problems, and long-term temporal stability. Rule training was as good in transfer as representation training, but representation training had a higher immediate learning effect and greater temporal stability.     

Understanding the language of reasoning: Cognitive,linguistic, and developmental influences

Certain linguistic structures imply speakers' beliefs about their utterances. Factuals imply that the speaker's hypothesis matches observed data; counterfactuals suggest that hypotheses and observations differ, and uncertainty implies that unclear observations make many hypotheses tenable. We examined how age(11-and 16-year-olds and college students) and syntactic structure (subordinating conjunctions, cognitive verbs, and verb modifications) affect the ability to specify the hypothetical and observational referents of expressions of factual, counterfactual, and uncertainty beliefs. There was considerable linguistic growth during adolescence. College students outperformed the younger students. Age differences were most pronounced on judging the hypothetical referents of counterfactuals and uncertainty structures. The two precollege groups often misinterpreted counterfactuals and uncertainty structures because they equated hypotheses with observations. They seldom understood that uncertainty meant that more than one hypothesis could account for observations. Verb modifications were easier to interpret than cognitive verbs, and subordinating conjunctions were hardest. Factuals were easier than counterfactuals and uncertainty structures.     

Dynamic awareness of age-related losses predict concurrent and subsequent changes in daily inductive reasoning performance

To address gaps in previous research, we examined daily within-person associations between awareness of age-related change (AARC) and cognitive performance in older adults. One hundred twelve adults aged 60–90 participated in an online daily diary study for nine consecutive days. On Day 1, they reported demographic information. On Days 2–9, they reported daily AARC, subjective age, and stressors and completed three tasks that gauged memory (word recall), perceptual speed (number comparison), and reasoning (letter series), respectively, once per day. Unconditional multilevel models revealed significant within-person fluctuations in daily cognitive performance and daily AARC. Controlling for age, education, health, and daily stressors, daily awareness of age-related losses was negatively associated with letter series scores of the same day and changes from one day to the next. The effects held over and above AARC gains and subjective age. Dynamic, naturally occurring perceptions of ageing may influence within-person concurrent and subsequent changes in reasoning performance on a daily basis and point to a promising avenue of intervention.     

Measurement issues associated with conditional reasoning tests: An examination of faking

Conditional reasoning (CR) is a new item format that measures personality by indirectly assessing reliance upon the cognitive biases associated with specific traits (James et al., 2005). Previous research suggests that, relative to self-report measures, responses on CR-based measures are more difficult to distort (LeBreton, Barksdale, Robin, & James, 2007). The issue of response distortion in the context of CR-based measures was evaluated in two studies. Study 1 (within-subjects) and Study 2 (between-subjects) both investigated whether responses on a CR-based test of addiction could be faked when indirect assessment was upheld. Results of both studies indicated that, unlike a self-report measure of a similar construct, the CR-based measure was unaffected by response distortion.     

A factor analysis of intra-task performance on two psychomotor tests

There are indications that even during the short time of administration of a single psychomotor test, the ability or abilities sampled may shift materially in importance. It then becomes important to know the stages in which these fluctuations occur, the stage at which the test is most complex, and the stage at which the test most nearly measures one ability at a time. This paper describes an application of factorial methods to this problem. Factor analysis of inter-trial correlations on two models of the Rudder Control Test revealed three factors, Steadiness-Control, Precision of Movement, and Strength. The same factor pattern was confirmed in a separate factor analysis on another sample in which the order of administration of the tests was reversed. Implications are pointed out for future psychomotor test development.Perceptual and Motor Skills Research Laboratory, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. The opinions or conclusions contained in this report are those of the author. They are not to be construed as reflecting the views or indorsement of the Department of the Air Force.     

Dual processing in reasoning: two systems but one reasoner

Human reasoning has been characterized as an interplay between an automatic belief-based system and a demanding logic-based reasoning system. The present study tested a fundamental claim about the nature of individual differences in reasoning and the processing demands of both systems. Participants varying in working memory capacity performed a reasoning task while their executive resources were burdened with a secondary task. Results were consistent with the dual-process claim: The executive burden hampered correct reasoning when the believability of a conclusion conflicted with its logical validity, but not when beliefs cued the correct response. However, although participants with high working memory spans performed better than those with lower spans in cases of a conflict, all reasoners showed similar effects of load. The findings support the idea that there are two reasoning systems with differential processing demands, but constitute evidence against qualitative individual differences in the human reasoning machinery.     

Measurement issues associated with conditional reasoning tests: indirect measurement and test faking

Conditional reasoning is a new measurement technique used to measure cognitive biases associated with latent personality motives. The current article describes 3 studies examining 2 related measurement issues associated with conditional reasoning tests (CRTs). Study 1 examined the necessity of maintaining indirect assessment when administering CRTs. Results indicated that, compared with a control condition, 2 experimental conditions that disclosed the purpose of assessment yielded significant mean shifts on a CRT. Study 2 explored whether CRTs could be faked when the purpose of assessment was not disclosed. Results indicated that when indirect measurement was maintained, CRTs appeared to be resistant to faking. Study 3 compared scores on the Conditional Reasoning Test for Aggression across student, applicant, and incumbent samples. Results indicated no significant mean differences among these samples.