Reasoning from connectives and relations between entities

This article reports investigations of inferences that depend both on connectives between clauses, such as or else, and on relations between entities, such as in the same place as. Participants made more valid inferences from biconditionals—for instance, Ann is taller than Beth if and only if Beth is taller than Cath—than from exclusive disjunctions (Exp. 1). They made more valid transitive inferences from a biconditional when a categorical premise affirmed rather than denied one of its clauses, but they made more valid transitive inferences from an exclusive disjunction when a categorical premise denied rather than affirmed one of its clauses (Exp. 2). From exclusive disjunctions, such as Either Ann is not in the same place as Beth or else Beth is not in the same place as Cath, individuals tended to infer that all three individuals could be in different places, whereas in fact this was impossible (Exps. 3a and 3b). The theory of mental models predicts all of these results

Contrast class cues and performance facilitation in a hypothesis-testing task: Evidence for an iterative counterfactual model

Hypothesis-testing performance on Wason's (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 12:129-140, 1960) 2-4-6 task is typically poor, with only around 20% of participants announcing the to-be-discovered "ascending numbers" rule on their first attempt. Enhanced solution rates can, however, readily be observed with dual-goal (DG) task variants requiring the discovery of two complementary rules, one labeled "DAX" (the standard "ascending numbers" rule) and the other labeled "MED" ("any other number triples"). Two DG experiments are reported in which we manipulated the usefulness of a presented MED exemplar, where usefulness denotes cues that can establish a helpful "contrast class" that can stand in opposition to the presented 2-4-6 DAX exemplar. The usefulness of MED exemplars had a striking facilitatory effect on DAX rule discovery, which supports the importance of contrast-class information in hypothesis testing. A third experiment ruled out the possibility that the useful MED triple seeded the correct rule from the outset and obviated any need for hypothesis testing. We propose that an extension of Oaksford and Chater's (European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 6:149-169, 1994) iterative counterfactual model can neatly capture the mechanisms by which DG facilitation arises

Impaired Systematic, Higher Order Strategies in Depression and Helplessness: Testing Implications of the Cognitive Exhaustion Model

Cognitive exhaustion is explored as theoretical perspective in analyzing cognitive deficits observed as a result of learned helplessness and depression. According to this view, mild depression or uncontrollability does not reduce motivation to perform, but instead limits the resources available for systematic, higher order strategies of thinking. We report two lines of research. First, using category learning, we distinguish between tasks in which performance benefits from systematic and flexible strategies, and those that equally benefit from simpler fallback strategies. Helplessness-trained persons, compared to controls, are less likely to apply the former strategies. Second, we focus on mental model construction. After learning preliminary materials control participants demonstrated a generative way of thinking. They systematically applied logical rules to construct mental models, whereas depressed and helplessness-trained persons showed little evidence of such constructive activity. We discuss these findings in relation to other theories about cognitive deficits in depression and helplessness