Fiddick L, Cosmides L, Tooby J
Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Lentzeallee 94, D-14195, Berlin, Germany.
Cognition. 2000 Oct 16;77(1):1-79. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(00)00085-8.
The Wason selection task is a tool used to study reasoning about conditional rules. Performance on this task changes systematically when one varies its content, and these content effects have been used to argue that the human cognitive architecture contains a number of domain-specific representation and inference systems, such as social contract algorithms and hazard management systems. Recently, however, Sperber, Cara & Girotto (Sperber, D., Cara, F., & Girotto, V. (1995). Relevance theory explains the selection task. Cognition, 57, 31-95) have proposed that relevance theory can explain performance on the selection task - including all content effects - without invoking inference systems that are content-specialized. Herein, we show that relevance theory alone cannot explain a variety of content effects - effects that were predicted in advance and are parsimoniously explained by theories that invoke domain-specific algorithms for representing and making inferences about (i) social contracts and (ii) reducing risk in hazardous situations. Moreover, although Sperber et al. (1995) were able to use relevance theory to produce some new content effects in other domains, they conducted no experiments involving social exchanges or precautions, and so were unable to determine which - content-specialized algorithms or relevance effects - dominate reasoning when the two conflict. When experiments, reported herein, are constructed so that the different theories predict divergent outcomes, the results support the predictions of social contract theory and hazard management theory, indicating that these inference systems override content-general relevance factors. The fact that social contract and hazard management algorithms provide better explanations for performance in their respective domains does not mean that the content-general logical procedures posited by relevance theory do not exist, or that relevance effects never occur. It does mean, however, that one needs a principled way of explaining which effects will dominate when a set of inputs activate more than one reasoning system. We propose the principle of pre-emptive specificity - that the human cognitive architecture should be designed so that more specialized inference systems pre-empt more general ones whenever the stimuli centrally fit the input conditions of the more specialized system. This principle follows from evolutionary and computational considerations that are common to both relevance theory and the ecological rationality approach.
华生选择任务是一种用于研究条件规则推理的工具。当改变该任务的内容时，其表现会系统性地发生变化，这些内容效应被用来论证人类认知结构包含许多特定领域的表征和推理系统，比如社会契约算法和危险管理系统。然而，最近斯珀伯、卡拉和吉罗托（斯珀伯，D.，卡拉，F.，& 吉罗托，V.（1995）。关联理论解释选择任务。认知，57，31 - 95）提出，关联理论可以解释选择任务中的表现——包括所有内容效应——而无需调用专门针对内容的推理系统。在此，我们表明仅靠关联理论无法解释多种内容效应——这些效应是预先预测到的，并且由那些调用用于（i）社会契约以及（ii）在危险情境中降低风险的特定领域算法来进行表征和推理的理论能简洁地解释。此外，尽管斯珀伯等人（1995）能够运用关联理论在其他领域产生一些新的内容效应，但他们没有进行涉及社会交换或预防措施的实验，因此无法确定当两者冲突时，哪种——针对内容的专门算法还是关联效应——在推理中占主导地位。当构建如本文所报告的实验，使不同理论预测出不同结果时，结果支持社会契约理论和危险管理理论的预测，这表明这些推理系统会优先于内容通用的关联因素。社会契约和危险管理算法能更好地解释各自领域中的表现这一事实，并不意味着关联理论所假定的内容通用逻辑程序不存在，或者关联效应从未发生。然而，这确实意味着需要一种有原则的方式来解释当一组输入激活多个推理系统时哪种效应将占主导地位。我们提出先发特异性原则——人类认知结构的设计应使得每当刺激完全符合更专门系统的输入条件时，更专门的推理系统会优先于更通用的系统。这一原则源于关联理论和生态理性方法所共有的进化及计算方面的考虑。
