Development and use of conditional reasoning

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Conditional reasoning involves making deductive inferences based on if-then premises. It is a key component of advanced reasoning, and understanding its nature and developmental course is a key problem in cognitive psychology. The proposed program of research is an extension of an on-going program that has combined mental model theory (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1999; 2002) with an explicit information processing account of model generation (Markovits & Barrouillet, 2002). A key postulate of this model is that conditional reasoning in children, and in unprepared adults, is heavily dependent on processes involved in information retrieval from semantic memory. Previous research has established that the kinds of inferences that are made both by children and many adults are influenced by the efficiency of retrieval processes (Janveau-Brennan & Markovits; Markovits & Quinn, 2001; 1999; Quinn & Markovits, 1998). In addition, the model makes some explicit predictions about the roles of inhibition in reasoning with contrary-to-fact premises (Simoneau & Markovits, 2003) and about the way that working memory capacity is related to reasoning (Markovits & Doyon, 2004). The proposed program will extend these results in the following ways. A first set of studies will use time constraints to examine the way that premises are processed when retrieval possibilities are limited. A second set of studies will examine the relation between inferences and justifications made by reasoners. Latencies for inferences will be used to estimate retrieval probability and these will be input into a MPT mathematical model. A third set of studies will examine changes in the way that children reason with false and abstract premises. Children will be presented with videos that describe fantasy worlds. They will be asked to make inferences within the context of these worlds. Other studies will examine the relation between inhibitory capacity, working memory and reasoning with false premises, and the relation between probabilistic and deductive reasoning.