Psychologists have studied syllogistic inferences for more than a century, but no extant theory gives an adequate account of them. Reasoners appear to reason using different strategies. A complete account of syllogisms must therefore explain these strategies and the resulting differences from one individual to another in the patterns of conclusions that they draw. We propose a dual-process theo...

Studies of syllogistic reasoning have demonstrated a nonlogical tendency for people to endorse more believable conclusions than unbelievable ones. This belief bias effect is more dominant on invalid syllogisms than valid ones, giving rise to a logic by belief interaction. We report an experiment in which participants' eye movements were recorded in order to provide insights into the nature and ...

This paper presents a logic appropriate for mass terms, that is, a logic that does not presuppose interpretation in discrete models. Models may range from atomistic to atomless. This logic is a generalization of the author's work on natural language reasoning. The following claims are made for this logic. First, absence of variables makes it simpler than more conventional formalizations based o...

The domain specificity and generality of belief-biased reasoning was examined across a height judgment task and a syllogistic reasoning task that differed greatly in cognitive requirements. Moderate correlations between belief-bias indices on these 2 tasks falsified an extreme form of the domain specificity view of critical thinking skills. Two measures of cognitive ability and 2 measures of co...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the inductive and deductive reasoning abilities of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Following previous research, it was predicted that people with OCD would show different abilities on inductive reasoning tasks but similar abilities to controls on deductive reasoning tasks. DESIGN A two-group comparison was used with both gro...