Document Detail


Conditional reasoning, frequency of counterexamples, and the effect of response modality.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  20516228     Owner:  NLM     Status:  MEDLINE    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
Geiger and Oberauer (2007) found that when asked to reason with conditionals, people are very sensitive to information about the relative frequency of exceptions to conditional rules and quite insensitive to the relative number of disabling conditions. They asked participants to rate their degree of certainty in a conclusion. In the following studies, we investigated the possibility that this kind of response encourages a more probabilistic mode of processing compared with the usual dichotomous response. In Study 1, participants were given a variant of the problems used by Geiger and Oberauer with either the same scaled response format or a dichotomous categorical response. The results with the scaled response were identical to those of Geiger and Oberauer. However, the results with the categorical response presented a very different profile. In Study 2, we presented similar problems using only frequency information, followed by a set of abstract conditional reasoning problems. The participants who performed better on the abstract problems showed a significantly different response profile than those who did worse on the abstract problems in the categorical response condition. No such difference was observed in the scaled response condition. These results show that response modality strongly affects the way in which information is processed in otherwise identical inferential problems and they are consistent with the idea that scaled responses promote a probabilistic mode of processing.
Authors:
Henry Markovits; Hugues Lortie Forgues; Marie-Laurence Brunet
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Publication Detail:
Type:  Comparative Study; Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial    
Journal Detail:
Title:  Memory & cognition     Volume:  38     ISSN:  1532-5946     ISO Abbreviation:  Mem Cognit     Publication Date:  2010 Jun 
Date Detail:
Created Date:  2010-06-02     Completed Date:  2010-10-14     Revised Date:  -    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  0357443     Medline TA:  Mem Cognit     Country:  United States    
Other Details:
Languages:  eng     Pagination:  485-92     Citation Subset:  IM    
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec, H3C 3P8 Canada. henrymarkovits@gmail.com
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MeSH Terms
Descriptor/Qualifier:
Adolescent
Association Learning*
Awareness*
Female
Humans
Logic
Male
Models, Statistical
Probability Learning*
Problem Solving*
Young Adult

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine


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