Diverse Evidence for Dissociable Processes in Inductive Reasoning

Previous work suggests that inductive and deductive reasoning may be accomplished by different processes. Here, we examine whether different phenomena of inductive reasoning, previously explained in the same way, may rely on different types of processes. In Experiment 1 we show that trials which examine sensitivity to sample size in inductive reasoning have greater effects on secondary task performance than do trials examining sensitivity to the diversity of the sample. In Experiment 2 we show that in a surprise recognition memory test, participants have significantly better memory for the content of diversity trials than for sample size trials. Both findings are consistent with the suggestion that some phenomena of inductive reasoning may be rule-based, whereas others may depend on feature-level processing.