Directionality of conditionals in the context of visual priming

According to the mental models theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983, 1993, 2001; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991), conditional reasoning is based on the construction of mental models of the premises and drawing conclusions from them. The number of models required in a reasoning task is the main predictor of the difficulty of the task. Besides the number of models, another factor that can affect conditional reasoning is the directionality of premises (Evans, 1993). In our previous research we have demonstrated the strong conditional directionality effect on the speed and accuracy of conditional inference verification (Valerjev, Bajšanski, & Gulan, 2010). In the study presented here, we examined the effects of the spatial orientation of antecedent and consequent, as well as the directionality of premises on conditional reasoning.