Premise Misinterpretation and Syllogistic Reasoning

A study by Ceraso and Provitera (1971) found that elaboration of the premises used in syllogistic reasoning led to substantially improved performance. This finding is of considerable importance because of the implications it has for mental logic and mental models theories of reasoning. Three experiments are reported, which replicated and extended the original findings. It was found that elaboration led to a significant improvement in performance, but that this was confined to multiple model syllogisms, where the elaboration has the effect of reducing the number of models involved. A fourth experiment indicated that elaboration can vary within the same syllogism depending on the direction of the conclusion drawn. These findings are best explained under the assumption that reasoners build mental models when solving problems and that elaboration can reduce the number of possible models.     

Facilitation in the abstract selection task: The effects of attentional and instructional factors

The present study examined performance on Wason's four-card abstract selection task. Baseline performance is very poor, usually less than 10% correct; and this task has a long record of resistance to facilitation. It was hypothesized that the two primary sources of difficulty are selective encoding of the problem information and the lack of satisfactory analytic processing. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, performance was improved by explicating the implication rule. The majority of subjects, however, still failed to make the correct selection. Subjects were required in Experiment 2 to provide reasons for their selection or non-selection of each of the cards. This response procedure, paired with an explicated rule, led to further improvements in performance (over 50% correct selections). In Experiment 3, the influence of the type of selection instruction (true-false vs. violation) was examined. Paired with an explicated rule and the reasons response format, violation instructions led to one of the highest correct selection rates ever observed for any version of the selection task: over 80% correct. Because of the importance of this result, it was replicated twice. The results of these three experiments are discussed in terms of Johnson-Laird and Byrne's mental models theory and Evans's two-stage model of reasoning.     

Permission schemas and the selection task

Cheng and Holyoak's abstract permission schema version of Wason's selection task and the standard abstract version of the task were examined in two experiments, each a factorial design with type of problem (permission vs. standard), presence or absence of a checking context, explicit or implicit negatives on the not-p and not-q cards, and presence or absence of a rule clarification statement as factors. The original permission problem violation-type instruction was employed in Experiment 1, and Margolis's not-p and not-q violation instruction (Griggs & Jackson, 1990) was used in Experiment 2. Subjects were 640 university undergraduates, with each subject solving only one problem. The major findings for permission tasks were: (1) facilitation for the abstract permission version was replicated but found to be dependent upon the presence of explicit negatives on the not-p and not-q cards; and (2) this facilitation was enhanced by the Margolis not-p and not-q instruction. Per Girotto, Mazzocco, and Cherubini (1992), these findings and the observed error patterns are consistent with pragmatic schema theory. The major findings for the standard version of the task were: (1) none of the factors significantly impacted proportion correct [performance was poor, ≦10% correct in 15 of 16 conditions] and (2) the number of not-p & not-q incorrect selections was increased significantly for the not-p and not-q instruction. These results are discussed in terms of Manktelow and Over's argument that the standard abstract task and the permission schema version are actually different problems.