Ormerod Thomas C, Richardson Juliet
Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, Fylde College, Lancaster, England.
Mem Cognit. 2003 Apr;31(3):467-78. doi: 10.3758/bf03194404.
A theory of how individuals construct mental models to draw inferences from single premises was tested in three experiments. Experiment 1 confirmed a counterintuitive prediction that it is easier to generate inferences between conditionals and disjunctions than it is to evaluate them. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, but an advantage found in the first experiment for conditional-to-disjunction over disjunction-to-conditional inferences was removed with different sentence contents. Experiment 3 showed that disjunction-to-conditional inferences were facilitated when premises expressed familiar indicative relations, whereas conditional-to-disjunction inferences were facilitated when premises expressed causal relations. The results indicate that small changes in task format can have large effects on the strategies that people use to represent and reason about different sentential connectives. We discuss the potential for theories other than mental models to account for these results. We argue that, despite the important role played by single-premise inferences in paraphrasing logical forms during inference, mental logic theories cannot account for the results reported here.
一项关于个体如何构建心理模型以从单个前提进行推理的理论在三项实验中得到了检验。实验1证实了一个违反直觉的预测，即生成条件句和选言句之间的推理比评估它们更容易。实验2重复了这一发现，但在第一个实验中发现的从条件句到选言句的推理比从选言句到条件句的推理的优势，在使用不同句子内容时消失了。实验3表明，当前提表达熟悉的指示关系时，从选言句到条件句的推理会得到促进，而当前提表达因果关系时，从条件句到选言句的推理会得到促进。结果表明，任务形式的微小变化会对人们用于表示和推理不同句子连接词的策略产生很大影响。我们讨论了除心理模型之外的其他理论解释这些结果的可能性。我们认为，尽管单前提推理在推理过程中对逻辑形式进行释义时发挥着重要作用，但心理逻辑理论无法解释这里报告的结果。
