The experimental task

Comparing measures of individual differences in performance of Conditional Reasoning

Seoane, Gloria and Valiña, Mª Dolores and Ferraces, Mª José and Martín, Montserrat (1997) Comparing measures of individual differences in performance of Conditional Reasoning. In Arce, Constantino and Seoane, Gloria, Eds. Proceedings 10th European Meeting of the Psychometric Society, pages 163, Santiago de Compostela (Spain).

Abstract

This study examined the following issues: 1) The relation among different measures in psychometric ability tests (verbal comprehension and reasoning), computerized measure of comprehension skills and the subjects' performance in experimental task of conditional reasoning, 2) whether or not good and poor comprehenders sistematically differ in their performance in Wason's selection task and 3) the differential influence of rule content and instruction on the subjects's performance in the selection task. 154 undergraduate students each completed three psychometric ability tests and a computerized spanish version of Gernsbacher´s Comprehension Battery. The problems just in this study were previously administered by Valiña & cols (1996). The results showed that: a) Performance in Wason´s selection task with abstract and thematic-permission content in terms of logical index is related to measures of the DAT-VR, b) In terms of differential analyses it was found that the logical index was considerably better in the higher reasoning-verbal group (DAT-VR) with abstract content and thematic-permission, but differences were not found in performance among good and poor verbal comprehenders (PMA-V & Gernsbacher´s Comprehension Battery) or subjects with high and low scores in the PMA-R, and c) for the logical index and the matching index, the principal effects of the content of the rule and the instructions were registered.

Comparing Measures of Individual Differences in Conditional Reasoning

Gloria Seoane , M? Dolores Valiña, , M? José Ferraces & Montserrat Martín

University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

Introduction

The study of thinking and reasoning is a topic of central interest for economists, anthropologists, logicians, pedagogues and of course for psychologists. A central problem in the experimental investigation in Psychology is to describe how people think and reason deductively and inductively.

There are three fundamental theoretical approaches to deductive reasoning in the Cognitive Psychology: mental logic, mental models and pragmatic schemas There are several proponents of a universal mental logic (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) or natural logics (Braine, 1978, 1990, 1994; Braine & O?Brien, 1991; Braine & Rumain, 1983; Osherson, 1974, 1975; Rips, 1983, 1990, 1994). Other authors propose that reasoning is based on construction and evaluation of mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991). A third approach asserts that reasoning is not based on general inference rules and assumes that people have domain-specific reasoning mechanisms such as pragmatic reasoning schemas inductively acquired (Cheng & Holyoak, 1985, 1989; Cheng, Holyoak, Nisbett & Oliver, 1986; Holyoak & Cheng, 1995) or innates procedures for identify potential deviations from social contracts (Cosmides 1985, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992)

Psychometrics studies the thinking from a different perspective. The central interest for the researchers in Psychometrics is not the understanding of underlying cognitive processes and mental representations but the study of the individual differences in these mental processes.

However, despite the differences between these two approaches to the study of human reasoning the categorical syllogisms and linear syllogisms were included on early intelligence tests (Burt, 1919, 1921; Thurstone, 1938; Guilford, 1959). Moreover, in the past decades there is a novel and comparatively neglected field: the study of qualitative and quantitative differences in reasoning. Roberts (1993, p. 575) suggested that:

"The problem of individual differences is as follows: if a theory of reasoning is being proposed that is intended to describe the processes used by all people for all reasoning tasks, then what is the status of this theory if it is subsequently found that not all people are using the same processes?."

Galotti, Baron & Sabini (1986) examined the correlates of reasoning ability on a syllogistic reasoning task. They found evidence for the use of both models and rules of reasoning. In a previous work Sternberg and Weil (1980) found individual differences in reasoning strategies (a mental model strategy, a deduction rule strategy and a mixture of both) in the resolution of experimental tasks that involve linear syllogisms.

Alternatively, Sternberg and Gastel (1989) investigated information processing during the solution of inductive reasoning problems (analogies, classifications and series completions) and also administred five psychometric tests to each subject. They show correlations between experimental tasks and psychometric tests. These correlations address two principal questions. First, are scores on the experimental tasks related to scores on the psychometric tests?. Second, do the correlations with the reasoning tests differ from those with verbal/perceptual factor?. It was found that the correlations of the experimental task with the reasoning tasks are higher than those with verbal/perceptual tasks. Thus, "the experimental tasks do appear to tap abilities related to those tapped by the psychometric tests" (p. 8).

Despite the importance of conditional reasoning in daily life, the study of qualitative individual differences has not become a central focus in cognitive or psychometric studies. There is no nearly previous experimental research about this issue. We found in a previous study (Valiña, Seoane, Ferraces & Martín, 1995) a considerably better performance in the Wason?s selection task in the higher verbal group (DAT-VR) but there were no differences between subjects with high and low scores on the PMA-E psychometric test. In the present experiment we explore the relation among different measures in psychometric ability tests (verbal comprehension and reasoning) and the performance of this experimental conditional reasoning task.

The experimental task

The Wason?s selection task is one paradigm widely used for studying conditional reasoning. The original problem was elaborated by Wason (1966,1968). He presented a conditional rule ?every card that has a vowel on one side has an even number on the other? and four cards: E, K, 4 and 7. The subjects? task is to decide which cards should be turned over to test the conditional rule.

Frequently, the subjects only selected the E card (p) or the E and 4 cards ( p and q). The correct response is the selection of the E and 7 cards (p and not q), but only 5-10% of the subjects chose these cards. The subjects selected a case for which the rule is true, but it is a negative instance which provides a violating case and can prove the truth or the falsity of the rule.

We selected this task in part because has long been of interest to experimental psychologist (see Evans, 1982, 1989; Wason, 1983; Evans, Newstead & Byrne, 1993; Newstead & Evans, 1995, for revisions) and moreover because it is one of the most widely used paradigm for studying the importance of factors related to the role of pragmatic knowledge in reasoning (Waso & Shapiro, 1971; Johnson-Laird, Legrenzi & Legrenzi, 1972; Griggs, 1983, 1989; Wason, 1983; Chrostowski & Griggs, 1985; Yachanin, 1986; Pollard & Evans, 1987; Girotto & cols., 1989; Valiña, Seoane, Ferraces & Martín, 1995, 1996).

Concretely, in this paper we examined the following questions: (1) the relation among different measures in psychometric ability tests (verbal comprehension and reasoning), computerised measure of comprehension skills and the subjects?s performance in the experimental task of conditional reasoning, (2) whether or not good and poor comprehenders sistematically differ in their performance in Wason?s selection task (Wason, 1966, 1968) and (3) the differential influence of rule content and instructions on the subject?s performance in the selection task.

METHOD

Subjects

One hundred and fifty-four undergraduates (20 males, 134 females; mean age 21 years), studying Psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) participated in this study. The students participated as partial fulfillment of a course requirement. They had not participated in similar experiment and none had any prior training in formal logic.

Data from 18 participants were not used because they failed to follow the experimental instructions or they had not completed all the task.