What do you think I think you think?: Strategic reasoning in matrix games

In reasoning about strategic interpersonal situations, such as in playing games, an individual's representation of the situation often includes not only information about the goals and rules of the game, but also a mental model of other minds. Often such mental models involve a hierarchy of reflexive reasoning commonly employed in social situations ("What do you think I think you think..."), and may be related to the developmental notion of 'theory of mind'. In two experiments, the authors formally investigate such interpersonal recursive reasoning in college-age adults within the context of matrix games. Participants are asked to predict the moves of another player (experimenter's confederate) in a two-choice, sequential-move game that may terminate at various stages with different payoffs for each player. Participants are also asked to decide optimally on their own moves based on the prediction made. Errors concerning the prediction, or translation of those predictions into decisions about one's action, were recorded. Results demonstrate the existence of a "default" mental model about the other player in the game context that is dynamically modified as new evidence is accumulated. Predictions about this other player's behavior are, in general, used consistently in decision-making, though the opponent tends to be modeled, by default, to behave in a myopic fashion not anticipating the participant's own action.     

Development of rules and strategies: balancing the old and the new

The experiments described in the lead articles replicate findings from previous studies of development of knowledge about balance scales, add several new findings, and raise four key questions: (a) How can rule use best be assessed? (b) How can we reconcile systematic use of rules with variable use of strategies? (c) When do children begin to use rules? and (d) How do children generate new rules? In this Reflection, we summarize current understanding of development of knowledge about balance scales and consider each of the four questions.     

Developmental and content effects in reasoning with causal conditionals

Two predictions derived from Markovits and Barrouillet's (2001) developmental model of conditional reasoning were tested in a study in which 72 twelve-year-olds, 80 fifteen-year-olds, and 104 adults received a paper-and-pencil test of conditional reasoning with causal premises ("if cause P then effect Q"). First, we predicted that conditional premises would induce more correct uncertainty responses to the Affirmation of the consequent and Denial of the antecedent forms when the antecedent term is weakly associated to the consequent than when the two are strongly associated and that this effect would decrease with age. Second, uncertainty responding to the Denial of the antecedent form ("P is not true") should be easier when the formulation of the minor premise invites retrieval of alternate antecedents ("if something other than P is true"). The results were consistent with the hypotheses and indicate the importance of retrieval processes in understanding developmental patterns in conditional reasoning with familiar premises.     

小学儿童对日常生活事件时间关系推理能力的初探

探查小学儿童对含有“在什么之前”“同时”日常生活事件时间关系的推理发展过程及其影响因素。被试为7岁、9岁、11岁3个年龄组共54名小学儿童,每个年龄组18人。4种问题模式分别为带有传递关系的单模型问题、带有无关前提的单模型问题、含两个前提的单模型问题、有肯定答案的多模型问题。每种问题模式含3种具体探察任务。主要研究结果表明：在本实验条件下,（1）儿童对事件时间顺序关系的推理从7岁到9岁有快速发展的趋势;（2）单模型和多模型任务无显著差异,模型数量似乎不是影响儿童推理成绩的关键因素;（3）儿童能够主动采用5种策略解决问题。逆向关系传递策略是问题解决的有效策略。     

21世纪我国消化病学发展战略的若干思考

就21世纪消化病的研究与发展的方向和展望,从宏观调控与哲学思想方面提出了如下几个措施;预防为主,人文社会为本;加强基础研究,充分利用科技成果;突出重点,循序渐进;促进中西医结合,充分利用和研究中医药的临床疗效;重视人才培养,提高梯队素质。     

How (and where) does moral judgment work?

Moral psychology has long focused on reasoning, but recent evidence suggests that moral judgment is more a matter of emotion and affective intuition than deliberate reasoning. Here we discuss recent findings in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including several studies that specifically investigate moral judgment. These findings indicate the importance of affect, although they allow that reasoning can play a restricted but significant role in moral judgment. They also point towards a preliminary account of the functional neuroanatomy of moral judgment, according to which many brain areas make important contributions to moral judgment although none is devoted specifically to it.     

Entailment with Near Surety of Scaled Assertions of High Conditional Probability

An assertion of high conditional probability or, more briefly, an HCP assertion is a statement of the type: The conditional probability of B given A is close to one. The goal of this paper is to construct logics of HCP assertions whose conclusions are highly likely to be correct rather than certain to be correct. Such logics would allow useful conclusions to be drawn when the premises are not strong enough to allow conclusions to be reached with certainty. This goal is achieved by taking Adams" (1966) logic, changing its intended application from conditionals to HCP assertions, and then weakening its criterion for entailment. According to the weakened entailment criterion, called the Criterion of Near Surety and which may be loosely interpreted as a Bayesian criterion, a conclusion is entailed if and only if nearly every model of the premises is a model of the conclusion. The resulting logic, called NSL, is nonmonotonic. Entailment in this logic, although not as strict as entailment in Adams" logic, is more strict than entailment in the propositional logic of material conditionals. Next, NSL was modified by requiring that each HCP assertion be scaled; this means that to each HCP assertion was associated a bound on the deviation from 1 of the conditional probability that is the subject of the assertion. Scaling of HCP assertions is useful for breaking entailment deadlocks. For example, it it is known that the conditional probabilities of C given A and of ¬ C given B are both close to one but the bound on the former"s deviation from 1 is much smaller than the latter"s, then it may be concluded that in all likelihood the conditional probability of C given A B is close to one. The resulting logic, called NSL-S, is also nonmonotonic. Despite great differences in their definitions of entailment, entailment in NSL is equivalent to Lehmann and Magidor"s rational closure and, disregarding minor differences concerning which premise sets are considered consistent, entailment in NSL-S is equivalent to entailment in Goldszmidt and Pearl"s System-Z ⁺. Bacchus, Grove, Halpern, and Koller proposed two methods of developing a predicate calculus based on the Criterion of Near Surety. In their random-structures method, which assumed a prior distribution similar to that of NSL, it appears possible to define an entailment relation equivalent to that of NSL. In their random-worlds method, which assumed a prior distribution dramatically different from that of NSL, it is known that the entailment relation is different from that of NSL.     

Reasoning with Factors

The paper proposes an analysis and a formalisation of factor-based reasoning. After examining the relevance of factors in legal reasoning, binary and scalable factors (dimensions) are distinguished and the relations between them are discussed. An account of a fortiori reasoning with both types of factors is developed. This article reports ideas which are discussed and developed in Sartor (2005). We refer to the latter work for the theoretical framework in which our analysis of factors is embedded.     

小学一～三年级儿童加减法策略选择的发展特点研究

随机选取90名小学一～三年级的儿童为被试,采用实验法和访谈法对儿童解决加减法算术题的策略发展特点进行了探讨。结果发现:1儿童能运用多种策略解决加减法算术题,在解决两个数的算术题时用到了13种策略,在解决三个数的算术题时用到了8种策略。2儿童在解决同一道题时大多能同时运用两种或两种以上的策略。3随着年龄的增长,儿童使用策略的总目呈简约化发展的趋势。4在解决两个数的算术题时,不同年级的儿童在使用出声策略、拆十策略、手势策略、逆算策略、数数策略的次数上差异显著,随着年级的增长其使用频率逐渐降低。5儿童在解决三个数的算术题时,各年级儿童使用出声策略、手势策略、对位策略差异显著,随着年级的增长其使用频率逐渐增高。