Effects of directionality in deductive reasoning: I. The comprehension of single relational premises.

Four experiments involving 123 university students tested directionality effects in the comprehension of spatial relations, quantified statements, and propositional connectives with a sentence-picture verification task. Presentation of the referents of terms in the statements was separated by 1 s, and presentation order was congruent or incongruent with the order of terms in the statement. Some relations showed faster verification times for congruent display order, others for incongruent display order, and still others showed no directionality effect. The authors proposed a 2-step process model for the construction of semantic representations of relational statements, in which a reference object is established first, and then the second object is attached in relation to it. This theory explains the various directionality effects as a general preference to process information about the reference object before information about the target object.

[1]  Robert Stalnaker.  A Theory of Conditionals , 2019, Knowledge and Conditionals.

[2]  Philip N. Johnson-Laird,et al.  How implication is understood. , 1969 .

[3]  Peter A. Hornby,et al.  The psychological subject and predicate , 1972 .

[4]  H. H. Clark,et al.  What's new? Acquiring New information as a process in comprehension , 1974 .

[5]  W. Chafe.  Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view , 1976 .

[6]  S. E. Newstead,et al.  Language and reasoning: a study of temporal factors , 1977, Cognition.

[7]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  The psychology of syllogisms , 1978, Cognitive Psychology.

[8]  Charles N. Li,et al.  Subject and topic , 1979 .

[9]  Ellen F. Prince,et al.  Toward a taxonomy of given-new information , 1981 .

[10]  J. St B. T. Evans,et al.  Directionality and temporal factors in conditional reasoning , 1981 .

[11]  Ian Begg,et al.  On the Interpretation of Syllogisms , 1982 .

[12]  E. M. Segal,et al.  Reference and comprehension: A topic-comment analysis of sentence-picture verification , 1984, Cognitive Psychology.

[13]  G. Boolos.  On ‘syllogistic inference’ , 1984, Cognition.

[14]  M. Gernsbacher.  Cognitive processes and mechanisms in language comprehension : the structure building framework , 1991 .

[15]  M. Braine,et al.  A Theory of If: A Lexical Entry, Reasoning Program, and Pragmatic Principles , 1991 .

[16]  ANDREAS LÖTSCHER,et al.  The pragmatics of nonreferential topics in German (and other languages) , 1992 .

[17]  Jonathan Evans,et al.  Human Reasoning: The Psychology Of Deduction , 1993 .

[18]  Thomas C. Ormerod,et al.  Reasoning with three Types of Conditional: Biases and Mental Models , 1993 .

[19]  Jonathan St. B. T. Evans,et al.  The mental model theory of conditional reasoning: critical appraisal and revision , 1993, Cognition.

[20]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article HOW DIAGRAMS CAN IMPROVE REASONING , 2022 .

[21]  G. Logan.  Spatial attention and the apprehension of spatial relations. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[22]  R. Ulrich,et al.  Effects of truncation on reaction time analysis. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[23]  Allen Newell,et al.  Deduction as verbal reasoning. , 1995 .

[24]  K C Klauer,et al.  Testing the Mental Model Theory of Propositional Reasoning , 1995, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[25]  Eine semantische Theorie des logischen Denkens , 1995 .

[26]  Stephen J. Payne,et al.  Problem Difficulty and Response Format in Syllogistic Reasoning , 1995 .

[27]  John Clibbens,et al.  Bias in Conditional Inference: Implications for Mental Models and Mental Logic , 1995, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[28]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Development of syllogistic reasoning. , 1995, The American journal of psychology.

[29]  K. Stenning,et al.  Image and Language in Human Reasoning: A Syllogistic Illustration , 1997, Cognitive Psychology.

[30]  Gino De Vooght,et al.  Spatial Mental Models in Linear Reasoning , 1998, Kognitionswissenschaft.