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The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions.[1] It is at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.
Research in this area addresses questions such as:
- How do people reason about sentences in natural language? The most famous example is Peter Wason's selection task, which tests how people reason about the conditional "if P then Q". Other popular tasks include categorical syllogisms and various logic puzzles like Sudoku.
- Psychologically, what are the relationships between induction, deduction, abduction, and analogy?
- What are the appropriate competence models? What does it mean to be rational? Initially classical logic was chosen as a competence model.[2] Later researchers have opted for non-monotonic logic[3][4] and Bayesian probability[5]. There is also the mental model approach towards reasoning, as well as connectionist approaches towards reasoning [6].
- How does reasoning relate to intelligence?[7]
- How does reasoning develop? Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development [8] describes a sequence of stages in the development of reasoning from infancy to adulthood. According to the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development, changes in reasoning with development come from increasing working memory capacity, increasing speed of processing, and enhanced executive functions and control. Increasing self-awareness is also an important factor. [9]
- How do various related factors such as linguistic pragmatics and emotion relate to the inferences people draw?[10][11]
- What are the neural correlates of reasoning, often investigated using event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging?[12]
External links
Notes
- ^ Leighton, J. P. (2004). Defining and describing reason, in The Nature of Reasoning (eds Leighton, J. P. and Sternberg, R. J.) Cambridge University Press
- ^ See, e.g., Wason, P. C. (1966). "Reasoning", in Foss, B. M.: New horizons in psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
- ^ Da Silva Neves, R., Bonnefon, J. F., & Raufaste, É. (2002). An empirical test for patterns of nonmonotonic inference. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 34, 107-130
- ^ Stenning, K. & van Lambalgen, M. (2005). Semantic Interpretation as Computation in Nonmonotonic Logic: The Real Meaning of the Suppression Task. Cognitive Science, 29, 919-960
- ^ See, e.g., Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (2001) The probabilistic approach to human reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 349-357
- ^ Sun, R. (1994). Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Commonsense Reasoning. John Wiley and Sons, New York.
- ^ See, e.g., Stanovich, K. E. & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 23, 645-726
- ^ Demetriou, A. (1998). Cognitive development. In A. Demetriou, W. Doise, K. F. M. van Lieshout (Eds.), Life-span developmental psychology (pp. 179-269). London: Wiley.
- ^ Demetriou, A., Mouyi, A., & Spanoudis, G. (2010). The development of mental processing. Nesselroade, J. R. (2010). Methods in the study of life-span human development: Issues and answers. In W. F. Overton (Ed.), Biology, cognition and methods across the life-span. Volume 1 of the Handbook of life-span development (pp. 36-55), Editor-in-chief: R. M. Lerner. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
- ^ See, e.g., Noveck, I. A. (2004) Pragmatic Inferences Related to Logical Terms. In Noveck, I. A. & Sperber, D. (ed.), Experimental Pragmatics, Palgrave Mcmillan
- ^ Blanchette, I. & Richards, A. (2004). Reasoning about emotional and neutral materials. Is logic affected by emotion? Psychological Science, 15, 745-75
- ^ See, e.g., Goel, V. (2005). Cognitive Neuroscience of Deductive Reasoning. In Holyoak, K. J. & Morrison, R. G. (ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, Cambridge University Press
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