Rijmen F, De Boeck P
Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Belgium.
Mem Cognit. 2001 Jan;29(1):165-75. doi: 10.3758/bf03195750.
In Experiment 1, complex propositional reasoning problems were constructed as a combination of several types of logical inferences: modus ponens, modus tollens, disjunctive modus ponens, disjunctive syllogism, and conjunction. Rule theories of propositional reasoning can account for how one combines these inferences, but the difficulty of the problems can be accounted for only if a differential psychological cost is allowed for different basic rules. Experiment 2 ruled out some alternative explanations for these differences that did not refer to the intrinsic difficulty of the basic rules. It was also found that part of the results could be accounted for by the notion of representational cost, as it is used in the mental model theory of propositional reasoning. However, the number of models as a measure of representational cost seems to be too coarsely defined to capture all of the observed effects.
在实验1中，复杂命题推理问题由几种逻辑推理类型组合而成：肯定前件式、否定后件式、选言肯定前件式、选言三段论和联言推理。命题推理的规则理论可以解释人们如何将这些推理结合起来，但只有在允许不同基本规则存在不同心理成本的情况下，才能解释问题的难度。实验2排除了一些并非基于基本规则内在难度的对这些差异的替代性解释。研究还发现，部分结果可以用表征成本的概念来解释，命题推理的心理模型理论中使用了这一概念。然而，作为表征成本度量的模型数量定义似乎过于粗略，无法捕捉所有观察到的效应。
