Conditional and syllogistic deductive tasks dissociate functionally during premise integration

Premise Interpretation in Conditional Reasoning

2 Premise Interpretation in Conditional Reasoning Conditional sentences are pervasive in human communication. Many arguments contain conditional premises or a conditional conclusion. The expression conditional reasoning could appropriately be applied to such arguments. However, there is a tradition in psychological research, which will be followed here, to restrict the use of this expression to...

Syllogistic Reasoning Tasks, Working Memory, and Skill

A subliminal premise can automatically trigger an elementary deductive inference

We investigated whether a basic deductive inference, namely the modus ponens, is an automatic processing step carried out even in the absence of willingness to reason and awareness of all the premises. We used an exhaustive set of conditional problems concerning numbers, with a subliminal second premise, followed by a target number. Participants evaluated whether the target number was odd or ev...

Deductive Databases with Conditional Facts

Department of Computer Science The Wichita State University Wichita, Kansas 67260-0083, USA e-mail: [email protected] Abstract. We introduce the notion of conditional facts in deductive databases. The language used to express the conditions in the basic facts does not involve constructs used to describe the database and is motivated by its potential usefulness in expressing disjunctive facts and ...

Probability and Instruction Effects in Syllogistic Conditional Reasoning

The main aim of this study was to examine whether people understand indicative conditionals on the basis of syntactic factors or on the basis of subjective conditional probability. The second aim was to investigate whether the conditional probability of q given p depends on the antecedent and consequent sizes or derives from inductive processes leading to establish a link of plausible cooccurre...